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A LOOK IN 
ON THE OTHER, FELLOW 



VANCE THOMPSON 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



TAKE IT FROM ME 



TAKE IT 
FROM ME 

A LOOK IN 
ON THE OTHER, FELLOW 



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BY 



VANCE THOMPSON 




Copyright, 1916, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



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New York : 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto : 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London : 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 

DEC 21 1916 

©CI.A453268 



I 



PREFACE 

T is always true that what a man writes 
is what he would like to be. In his 
prose you may see — wingless, it may 
be, and limping — the ideal life he would 
fain live. Even in the windy imperson- 
ality of fiction you glimpse the writer's 
daydream. For instance, Mr. Jack Lon- 
don, that eminent boy of letters, likes to 
think of himself as a reformer of social 
injustices ; but when you discover him in 
his novels you see that what he really 
wants to do is to go on playing, forever 
and ever, the ferocious games of imagi- 
native childhood — slaying wolves and res- 
cuing maidens in distress. 

It is true of all things written. 

You pick up a war book ; something dark 
and malignant looks at you out of the 
printed page — and it is the soul of the man 
who wrote it. Or, you are reading a 
lightly written volume of adventure and, 
quite suddenly, something unexpected and 
significant rises to the surface; then, for 
one swift moment, you — who had been 
5 



6 PREFACE 

idly interested in an author— find yourself 
face to face with a man. For the writer, 
no matter what he writes, inevitably un- 
covers his own face — tells his own story — 
paints his own vision — haunts his own 
dream — 

That is one of the awful things about 
writing. 

When you have written a book you take 
the squirming little thing up in your arms 
and find it is alive — alive and talking, with 
ghastly mimicry, in your own tone of 
voice. It is a terrible moment in a man's 
life, when he listens to the little voice of 
his book, faint and thin and phonographic, 
but appallingly like his own ! 

Now this book — the one you have in your 
hand — is, I trust, decidedly impersonal. 

Indeed the reason I have permitted my- 
self to appear — without reticence — in this 
preface is because I have kept myself out 
of the book. At least I have tried to keep 
myself out of it. It is not my voice you 
should hear ; it is not my face that should 
look out at you from the page of print ; no 
— in this book I have asked you to meet the 
most important man in all the world. And 
that man is neither you nor I; he's the 
Other Fellow. 



PEEFACE 7 

As you turn these pages you will meet 
Him at work and play, busy with tools and 
books and money wants, with purposes and 
dreams. In the end perhaps you will de- 
cide that in all the world He alone is of 
prime importance to you. It does not mat- 
ter whether your ambitions are high or, 
unfortunately, low ; it does not matter what 
you most want — power, money, good re- 
pute, happiness. It is out of the Other 
Fellow you have to get it. This is axio- 
matic. You can't make love alone; you 
can't make money alone — the law of ac- 
quiring riches, the law of acquiring power, 
the law of acquiring happiness, must be 
stated in terms of the Other Fellow. An 
old truth. And take it from me: the 
noblest work and the bravest deeds — all of 
them — are always done at the call of in- 
terests not personally one's own; they are 
done for the Other Fellow. 

So it is of Him I have written. 

I do not know whether people read pref- 
aces. They should. A preface is the 
proper entrance to a book — it is the vesti- 
bule. And for my part I have only dis- 
esteem for the burglarious reader who 
breaks into a book through the drawing- 
room window or crawls in by way of the 



8 PREFACE 

buttery-hatch. As you are a nice-mannered 
reader I take it for granted you have ap- 
proached this hook, decorously, through 
the vestibule. Then, as you open the door 
of the first chapter, you will find yourself 
confronted, by — a red necktie and a lumi- 
nous platitude. 

V. T. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface 5 

I. The Other Fellow at Large . . 11 

II. The Other Fellow in School and 

College 27 

' III. The Wisdom of the Nursery . . 49 

IV. The Other Fellow as a Friend . 65 

V. The Other Fellow in Business . 81 

VI. Polarizing the Other Fellow . 107 

VII. The Other Fellow and the Ballot 133 

VIII. The Fellow of the Other Eace . 151 

IX. The Mystery of the Other Fellow 175 



I 

THE OTHEE FELLOW AT LAEGE 



I 

THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 

ONE day Val O'Farrell, the famous 
detective, sent a man out to get 
in touch with a band of criminals, 
who were robbing warehouses in New 
York. The man had had some experience 
in detective work. He was quiet, pleasant- 
looking, with a sort of forthgoing manner 
that made it easy for him to get on 
with people. Dressed in rough-and-ready 
clothes, a cigar in his mouth, he went his 
way. A few hours later he came back to 
the office with the look of one who had 
been stoned and dragged in the gutter. 

1 < Well, what is it!" O'Farrell asked. 

"I found them all right, and I don't 
think they knew I was a detective/ ' said 
the battered man, "but they certainly did 
not love me." 

O'Farrell looked him over. 

"Did you wear that red necktie you've 
got round your neck now?" he asked. 

13 



14 TAKE IT FROM ME 

"Yes, I thought it would made me look 
the part." 

"You'll never make a detective," O'Far- 
rell said thoughtfully. "Criminals do not 
differ much from turkeys or bulls — the 
moment they saw that red rag of yours 
they began to get angry with you. And 
the longer they had to look at it the angrier 
they got. Take it from me," said the wise 
detective, "never flaunt a red flag when 
you want men to be friendly with you. 
Now go and get patched up." 

And when we were alone 'Farrell said : 
"That fellow is hopeless. He never 
thought of the impression he would make 
on others. He thought only of the impres- 
sion he was making on himself. I do not 
know why it is that all men are affronted 
when you come up to them in a red neck- 
tie. The cultured man feels merely a vague 
dislike for you, but the undeveloped man 
wants to knock you about the ears. It is 
a deep-buried instinct. I have never 
studied the philosophy of it, but from years 
of observation I know it to be a fact. The 
young man you saw here a moment ago 
will never make a detective — or anything 
else. He tied a red rag round his neck, 
because, in some obscure way, he felt it 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 15 

gave him a truculent, false sort of courage ; 
but he did not consider the curious psycho- 
logical effect the red rag would have on 
violent and criminal men. He was think- 
ing only of himself." 

This sort of thing is worth hearing : it is 
old wisdom — the oldest wisdom in the 
world — in a new guise. 

It is the philosophy of Otherfellowship. 

There is a famous phrase "Know Thy- 
self " which ancient Greek wisdom deemed 
its wisest utterance. Eightly understood 
it is luminous with meaning ; for the mind 
that turns its attention upon itself is in 
the way of attaining the highest knowl- 
edge. It is an old truth. There is no word 
so wonderful as the word self. There are 
no relations so mysterious and so mani- 
fold as those a man has with himself. In- 
deed, until these relations are adjusted — 
with at least some degree of understand- 
ing — life is a maze and a confusion. The 
man who is not on the right terms with 
himself — whose relations with self are not 
sound and good — is surely going toward 
disaster. 

Neither you nor I doubt it ; Self -Knowl- 
edge is a sacred thing; the Greek phrase 
shines like a star ; but — it is a second and 



16 TAKE IT FROM ME 

more luminous platitude — the main part 
of life is made up of one's relations to 
others. Your life is conditioned in others, 
precisely as motion is conditioned in mat- 
ter, as music is conditioned in silence. You 
cannot even live for yourself unless you 
live for the Other Fellow. 

There is no truth so old; there is no 
truth so formidable. 

Every road leads to it ; every lamp-post 
signals it — even as Val O'Farrell was 
guided to it by the signal light of a red 
necktie. I think his way of getting at this 
truth was as good as any other. It was 
human, real, practical. And that, it seems 
to me, is the way in which every great 
truth should be approached. 

There is nothing on earth so ridiculous 
as a great truth stalking about on stilts. 

How can it go about its life-saving busi- 
ness if it does not get down among men, 
even if it has to go on all fours? 

Eead here : The worst thing you can do 
to a truth is to embody it in high-stepping, 
mysterious-looking words. 

Wherefore in writing about the Other 
Fellow — of whom God has made millions — 
I want to strip the subject of the cant of 
Big Words. 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 17 

The Cult of Big Words 

I like to think the heavy grins that have 
roared over Europe have blown away more 
than the fortresses of metal and turf and 
stone — that they have blown away some of 
the Big Words. Two of these sham and 
pompous words were the idols of the ante- 
bellum days. Monstrous and shining, erect 
as totem poles, they towered in the plazas 
of life, crowned with capital letters: 
Humanity, Altruism. 

You may have met a king or two. It has 
been in my way of life to meet or study 
a goodly number of continental kings, and 
I made this astounding discovery: 

When you put a crown on a man he does 
not become Caesar but, by some obscure 
law, he ceases to be mere man and be- 
comes what the tree growers call a freak — 
like a white cypress. In a way that white 
thing is a tree, but it is not a cypress ; and 
your king in a crown is, in a broad sense, 
human, but he is not man. 

Crowned words are as unreal and dan- 
gerous as crowned men. 

The nations are learning to look askance 
at the high-stepping and mysterious-look- 
ing men in crowns; take it from me, you 



18 TAKE IT FROM ME 

will do well to look askance at words of 
that sort — especially when they come 
crowned with capital letters. 

Do you remember in ante-bellum days, 
how that pompous word Humanity strut- 
ted about? Things were to get themselves 
done — for Humanity. Science sweated in 
laboratories and clinics — for Humanity. 
It sliced up dogs and anatomized paupers 
— for Humanity. There were even men 
who proclaimed themselves Lovers of Hu- 
manity. And all that sort of thing. It 
became a cult, a credo, a totem. 

Now the plain, evident fact is this: If 
Humanity means anything at all it means 
men and women and, thank Heaven! chil- 
dren. You can't make an abstract thing 
of it — crown it with a capital letter — and 
then kneel down and worship it or stand 
up and love it. You can love men and 
women and children; you cannot love Hu- 
manity — for no sane man can love a vague, 
mathematical theorem, a vague "general 
average" of mankind. The moment you 
begin talking about Humanity you open the 
door to all the oily shams and anonymous 
cruelties of an imperfect civilization. 

There is an awful lot of cant in these 
big words and Jupiterian phrases. 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 19 

I do not take any stock in the man who 
is always prating of Humanity ; that huge, 
cold abstraction is merely something he 
has erected between himself and these liv- 
ing men, women, children of whom God 
(it can't be said too often) has created 
millions. I do not say that the man who 
is always prating of Universal Brother- 
hood has turned brotherliness out of doors. 
He may be, in fact, a very fraternal man ; 
but he, like the Lover of Humanity, is 
blinded by crowned words — by vague ab- 
stractions. His worship of Brotherhood 
implies a sinister and morose disregard 
of relations holier than brotherliness — of 
fatherhood, motherhood, childhood — of the 
holy inequalities of life — and of the holy 
equalities of husbandhood and wifehood. 

Do you mind if I lead you resolutely 
aside from this sort of cant? 

Let us leave the pompous phrases to the 
word-mongers and the orators. And while 
we are about it, we might as well dismiss, 
once for all, that smug little brother of 
Humanity — I mean that little crowned 
snob, Altruism. It is a bad word, a sham 
word; it isn't even good Latin. By the 
way I don't object to Latin — in fact I 
rather like it j old phrases ring pleasantly 



20 TAKE IT FROM ME 

in memory and there is no harm in giv- 
ing them utterance. When the Latinists 
wanted to talk about the thing behind the 
word they spoke frankly of the Other Fel- 
low. That was all. He was Alter Me — 
the other fellow — and no one dreamed of 
making an abstraction of him. 

Your Share of the World 

Neither you nor I are in much danger of 
being taken in by the cant of big words. 
That is a plain sort of obstacle and one 
can walk round it or turn and go the other 
way. But there is another peril — and I 
approach it with a certain degree of hesi- 
tation. I want to clear the way to the 
heart of the subject. I want to drive a 
road through all the cants and shams and 
misunderstandings that lie between me and 
the Other Fellow. And just at this point 
I am confronted by the danger of tramp- 
ling on something really fine and spiritual. 
It is the theory, essentially beautiful, that 
living and laboring for the good of the 
Other Fellow is a sacro-sanct sort of 
thing, made up of sacrifice and pallid en- 
thusiasms; that it is based on an austere 
contempt for personal advantage. In this 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 21 

belief men have gone to meet death in 
island camps of lepers. It is through its in- 
spiration that men have achieved the finest 
heroisms. It has inspired the bravest and 
most beautiful deeds — deeds of the highest 
spiritual significance. The spirit of self- 
sacrifice cannot be too reverently honored. 
It touches life at the highest point. It 
should touch it at the lowest point. It 
should be the very atmosphere of life. 
Life, unless it be permeated by it — ensouled 
by it — sinks into the dirt of spiritual 
squalor. That truth should be stated with 
all the emphasis that can be laid upon it. 
But there is something else. 

You have got to live your life in terms 
of the Other Fellow. The wisdom of visible 
facts proclaims it. It is a law. Now by 
every canon of intellectual integrity it is 
evident that if the law is not good for you 
it is not good for the Other Fellow; if it 
is not to your advantage it is not to his. 
If it is not good for the bee it is not good 
for the hive. 

And I will go a step further — 

Not recklessly, but with caution that 
comes from due thought, I will go this far : 

If it cannot be shown that the law ap- 
plies to material things — to material gains 



22 TAKE IT FROM ME 

and advantages — as well as to spiritual 
things it is a lie and a sham. It is a con- 
vention and not a law. If by helping the 
Other Fellow you cannot help yourself the 
law is false. 

Why should there be any pretense about 
the matter? 

You want to succeed in this life — in your 
daily life on this planet. The right-think- 
ing man desires material success, for he 
knows that out of his good fortune comes 
the good fortune of others. He knows that 
social welfare means personal welfare. 
The strength of his desire for personal, 
material success in life is the measure of 
his social-mindedness. His success or his 
failure depends upon his relations with 
others — with the social group. If he suc- 
ceeds he is giving something to others; if 
he fails the social group is so much the 
poorer. 

Of course you want to succeed in this 
life. 

And the purpose of this book is to show 
you that you can succeed only by acting 
in accordance with the eternal law that 
links you to your fellows. The law is uni- 
versal. If it breaks down at any one point 
— say, at the point of material success — it 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 23 

breaks down at all points. But this law 
does not break down. At every point it 
safeguards your opportunity for getting 
something from the social group — things 
material as well as spiritual, everyday 
wealth, place and power and good repute 
as well as spiritual leadership. 

This thought is not to be lightly cast 
away. It has been too much neglected — 
thrust into the scullery as though it were 
some poor Cinderella of the mind. Now 
your material success is not an evil thing, 
for always it is conditioned in the success 
of your fellows. You are adding, not sub- 
tracting. Men who have failed, by an ob- 
scure instinct of consolation, associate 
material success and evil. The real evil is 
failure, for it adds to the burden of others. 

"How can he labor to help his neighbor; 
Who is helpless to help himself?" 

And therefore — it is clear, is it not? — 
when I ask you to study the law that links 
you to your fellows, it is that you may 
gather with both hands. It is that you 
may build a house. It is that you may 
harvest grain. Who sows corn sows holi- 
ness. It is that you may learn the deep 
and tragic lesson that only by helping 



24 TAKE IT FROM ME 

others can you help yourself and — it is 
just as true — out of your success their good 
fortune must come. Your failure darkens 
the happiness of the social group. It is a 
social duty to succeed. You owe it to the 
group. And the law of fellowship is not 
a law of pallid sacrifice; it is a law of 
service. We are all working together at 
a loom. And our compelling duty is to 
weave as rich and splendid a web as can 
be woven out of material things. 

For — here is the meaning of it all — the 
spirit craves a better garment. 

TTie Generous Paymaster 

Definitions are dismal things, simply be- 
cause they are imperfect. They are crip- 
pled half-truths, with all the melancholy 
of incompleteness. But for all that they 
are the best aids we have in the effort we 
are always making to think clearly. With 
the assistance of a definition or two it is 
possible, I believe, to arrive at an under- 
standing of what is meant by success in 
life. If I have laid stress upon the mate- 
rial side of success in life it is because men 
and women must eat and children must be 
fed — first of all — if they are to be made 



THE OTHER FELLOW AT LARGE 25 

fit for the higher duties. But — you have 
not misunderstood me — success does not 
mean money bags; it does not mean pos- 
session of material things. 

Take this definition: 

Life is character striving to express it- 
self in terms of action. 

Now, when there is harmony between 
them — between the character and the act — : 
you have success. You may be a painter 
or a hermit, a farmer or a statesman ; what 
you are does not matter; you are success- 
ful if your true character is expressing 
itself, harmoniously, in your daily work. 
That is all there is to it. Look out in the 
world and you will see it is crowded with 
successful men and women, who day by 
day are translating character into action. 
Their success is based upon harmony be- 
tween character and action; unquestion- 
ably; but it is based also upon harmony 
between themselves and the social group. 
They have because they have given. It is 
what they have given that has made them 
rich — be it music or thought or corn or 
linen. Always they got more than they 
gave, for the Other Fellow is a generous 
paymaster. 

As you shall see. 



II 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 
AND COLLEGE 



II 



THE OTHEE FELLOW IN SCHOOL 
AND COLLEGE 

YOUTH is a strange thing — a strange 
thing revolving gloomily on its 
own axis. It is absorbed in itself. 
This new business of living — npon which 
it has so newly entered — takes up all its 
thought; and thus youth curls around it- 
self with jealous and suspicious com- 
placency. 

Of course this stage of growth is sane 
and normal. It is the time when one does 
one's development — sprouts damp and 
silky wings inside the cocoon. To stay in 
it overlong is death; that is why one has 
to split the shell and get out. Curiosity 
may tempt one out ; it is a compelling mo- 
tive. Love may call one forth — it is, I 
think, the motive that most often calls boy 
or girl out of the deep absorption of youth. 
At least it should be. One should hear a 
voice outside — a knock at the door — and 
29 



30 TAKE IT FROM ME 

run out to see another face and look into 
other eyes. But the men I know, as they 
go back in memory to that far-off event, 
tell me that what shook them out of them- 
selves was an aggression. Something 
rubbed against them. Inside the shell a 
fighting instinct stirred and the boy, whose 
thoughts had been centered on himself, 
woke to face the old antagonism of alien 
things and alien lives. I believe this is 
true of many boys — perhaps not of the 
finest sort of boy, but at all events of those 
very lovable common boys of whom God 
(you know the phrase) has made millions. 
What wakes them to the world is the plain 
old need of defense or attack. I do not 
wish it otherwise. It is nature's way. 
And perhaps there is an elemental sort of 
grandeur in it. 

I am, as you have discovered, a whole- 
hearted believer in loving the Other Fel- 
low. That love is the base and cement of 
life. But one doesn't have to love the 
Other Fellow in a maudlin way. One 
should love him — precisely as one loves 
one 's self. The precept was given long ago. 
"Love thy neighbor as thyself' ' — and 
that meant love him critically, for I don't 
imagine you love yourself iq a iaawkish 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 31 

and fulsome way. What you want is an 
alert, critical eye to your own defects — 
and those of your neighbor; and then to 
go on loving him with a whole heart, just 
as you love yourself in spite of all your 
nasty little ways. 

Loving your neighbor — loving the Other 
Fellow — does not mean, as the Irishman 
fancied, " cooing to each other like beastly 
little green love birds in a cage. ' ' 

It means something starker and better. 

And to that better thing your boy first 
woke when he was called out of himself by 
the grim need of defense. And there is in 
it, as I have said, an elemental sort of 
nobility. 

That great man, Alfred Henry Lewis, 
who seemed to incarnate the male common 
sense of his generation, had his own way 
of saying the same thing. I remember the 
emphasis he laid on this truth — which is 
the cornerstone of pure chivalry — that in 
no other way can you do a man so much 
honor as by recognizing his belligerent 
status and going to war with him. 
Now, this is a great truth, though it is 
not, of course, a complete one. No truth 
is, like an oyster, complete in itself. It 
is duplicate; it has two poles; and to 



32 TAKE IT FROM ME 

get it all you must study its polariza- 
tion. 

Many a boy who has slipped sheep- 
ishly into the house to hide a torn shirt 
or to conceal a black eye, was in reality 
as fine a hero as Du Guesclin or Guy of 
Warwick. 

For, take it from me, the boy who fights 
is nine times out of ten fighting for an 
ideal — f or a high and worthy cause. 

Boys do not quarrel over marbles. Their 
quarrel is over justice, or courtesy, or the 
law of their world. And in their world the 
little bout of fisticuffs takes the place of 
your gowned judges, penal institutions, 
hangmen, guillotines, electric chairs and 
social ostracisms. And I am not sure that 
your way is a bit better than theirs. 

On questions of chivalry — or matters of 
essential justice between fellow and other 
fellow — the boy is usually right. In such 
a case you could trust yourself more surely 
to a jury of boys than to a jury of men. 
Boys have an instinct for fair play. That 
is all they ever fight about. 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 33 

The Rules of the Game 

Do you mind going to school again, for 
a little while, with that splendid fellow 
who is going to be a man? 

There are two things to be got out of 
a school. 

The obvious motive in school-going is 
to learn how to use the tools of thought. 
There is not much more than that in all 
the elaborate devices of education. Educa- 
tion is not the acquirement of facts; it is 
gaining adeptness in the use of mental 
tools. If, by the time you leave school, or 
college, or the university, you have learned 
the deft use of the tools of thought you 
have got all that education can give you. 
The rest you must get yourself. You must 
cut your own timber. You must saw your 
own logs — build your own intellectual 
house. 

There 's a bigger work done in the schools 
than teaching tool craft. Unless I were 
sure of that, you and I should not be 
journeying back in fancy — down the years 
— to the schoolhouse of youth. What is 
done there that is of vital importance is 
the building of character, and character is 
built on the playground— where fellow 



34 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

meets with other fellow — and not in the 
schoolroom. No normal boy, no boy who 
is irreproachably sane, models himself on 
his schoolmaster. He never wants to look 
like him; in wildest imagining he never 
tries to fancy himself walking and talking 
and parting his hair as the master does — 
no matter how much he loves and respects 
him. There is too wide a space of years 
between them to encourage the old sincere 
flattery of imitation. 

It is on the playground the boy (and 
girl) meets the Other Fellow. He meets 
him in a game. 

And on this subject I have more than a 
word to say. 

I sincerely believe that sport is the holi- 
est thing — because it is the most unselfish 
thing — in the material world. Do you know 
whence the word sport came to you — its 
long and honorable pedigree? The mean- 
ing that lies at the root of the word is 
effort — not amusement and not emulation, 
although these things have been added to 
it; but it was an effort made in common 
for the mere joy of it. And that is a good 
thing. 

Somewhere back in the ages an Inspired 
Boy knocked a round stone out of his way 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 35 

with a stick — or kicked it with his foot — 
or tossed it in the air. So doing he in- 
vented all good games. The bad games 
were invented by weary, dark-faced kings. 

In every school yard, in every public 
square, there should be erected a statue of 
that Inspired Boy. He was the character 
builder; he built the character of untold 
generations — of the great civilizing races 
of mankind. 

Every good game, I repeat, consists in 
knocking a ball about — with foot, hand or 
stick. It is a game of football, baseball 
or handball; it is a game played with 
rackets or mallets or golf-clubs, polo-clubs, 
lacrosse-sticks, hockey-sticks or billiard- 
cues, but it is always the same game. 
There are certain inane little games one 
can play alone — pitting himself against 
himself, as it were. But the essential part 
of every game worth while is the Other 
Fellow — that good old Alter Me of the 
medieval playground. It is your oppor- 
tunity for knowing him. It is your first 
way of getting acquainted. It is your first 
lesson in that law of give and take, which 
is the ultimate law of life. It is giving 
a chance and taking it. It is " service and 
return." And the object of a game is not. 



36 TAKE IT FROM ME 

victory. You never find that idea among 
boys whose thinking is close to the real 
nature of things; you do find it unfortu- 
nately among foolish, full-grown profes- 
sional men, who kick a ball or bat it about 
the field for pay — that sort of thing is not 
sport ; it is an exhibition, which is a meaner 
and craftier thing. Victory in a game is 
incidental — just as children are incidental 
to marriage, desirable but not indispen- 
sable. You do not play for victory; you 
play to affirm your own skill, strength of 
hand, tactical ability and to measure your- 
self against the Other Fellow, according to 
the rules of the game. Losing the score is 
nothing; there is a fine, ultimate victory 
in having played the game according to 
the rules and taken the measure of the 
Other Fellow. Therein lies the deep ethical 
value of sport. It gives strength of hand 
and will, but the important thing is that 
a game is lost or won by your ability to 
understand the Other Fellow — who is on 
the other side of the net. 

There are other gains to be got from 
sport — gains physical and moral and ton- 
ically spiritual. One learns politeness, put- 
ting certain curbs on self-interest, forbid- 
ding insolence, roughness, contempt for 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 37 

fair play and disdain for the feeble. And 
another gain is that sport destroys the 
bully. 

Arrogance is merely a form of selfish- 
ness, and selfishness — you know it — is noth- 
ing more than a failure to understand 
the importance of the Other Fellow. 

If there is a danger that the exercise of 
physical prowess — of tangible force — be- 
gets a sense of superiority, in which there is 
a kind of arrogance, you may be sure it 
will be knocked to pieces in the game itself. 
For games are associations. One weakling 
may yield to arrogance ; but ten associated 
weaklings will pull the bully down and in- 
spire him with a sounder understanding 
of brotherliness. 

It is in his games that the boy gets his 
first experience in association. And asso- 
ciation is the basis of modern life — in- 
dustrial, financial, political. That it will 
be the future basis of international life is 
a fact as certain as the sun. 

When you play a game, when you learn 
to play it well, you gain self-confidence 
and that is good ; but above all and beyond 
you gain confidence in the Other Fellow 
and that is better. Indeed there may 
flash upon you — at some critical moment — 



38 TAKE IT FROM ME 

the blinding truth that you have greater 
confidence in him than in yourself. Then 
two things happen: the old ghost of arro- 
gance dies down and vanishes underfoot; 
what remains is the immensely important 
conviction that life is a relation — that 
leadership is collaboration — that your vic- 
tory is in the hands of the Other Fellow. 

The Status of the Other Fellow 

There was a man who wanted to write 
a nation's songs — it was Fletcher of Sal- 
toun — rather than make its laws. And if 
I had the choice of directing a nation's 
education or shaping its games I should 
plump for the sport. I had rather spend 
my life building character than in giving 
an edge to mental tools. There isn't a 
good game — a game of ball and stick — that 
doesn't teach a boy self-confidence. One 
and all they teach him self-respect — with 
proper pride he dresses for the game. One 
and all they teach him to hold his tongue — 
the invaluable art of silence; they teach 
not only politeness but respect for a com- 
mon law; and they teach him, often with 
dour knocks, that the most important per- 
son in all the world is not himself but the 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 39 

Other Fellow. That lesson, take it from 
me, is the ultimate lesson; until it is 
learned there can be only failure, cruelty, 
shame, discord and rebellion in life. 

I say — or did Alfred Henry Lewis say 
it? — there is something gained when you 
reach that rather primitive point where 
you recognize the belligerent status of the 
Other Fellow. At least he has risen over 
the horizon of your self-centered life. 
Your thoughts are getting away from your- 
self and going out to him. That is some- 
thing to the good. 

Let us not misunderstand each other. 

I can perfectly well imagine some dear 
peace-lapped soul — like my maiden aunt 
in Ville d'Avray — assuming, with horror, 
that my ideal of life is to go forth and 
punch the Other Fellow in the eye. Pos- 
sibly there w T as a little of that feeling in 
my more turbulent days. That belongs to 
the bad part of life, when you look up 
and see the Other Fellow still a long way 
off coming toward you and your unregen- 
erate impulse is to run to meet him and 
fall on his neck — and break it. Which is 
certainly bad. But the excuse — and glory 
— of it is this : You are not treating him 
as a neutral. 



40 TAKE IT FROM ME 

When you punch a man — or preferably 
a boy — in the eye he ceases to be a neutral. 
So do you. Both of you, with splendid 
simultaneousness, emerge from the smug 
and sickly state of indifference — that 
awful hand-washing state of the neutral 
man. 

Take it from me: The darkest and 
dirtiest crime that crawls under heaven is 
neutrality toward your fellow man. 

Fight him, if you must ; that has at least 
a little elemental chivalry in it; love him 
if you can — and you are tolerably sure to 
love the man you have fought; but the 
crime of crimes is to stand aloof from him 
in self-righteous neutrality — too proud to 
fight him and too cold to love him. 

The essential thing in life is not to hate 
and not to defy. Eight; but higher in its 
essence is the law that forbids you to walk 
by on the other side of the road. You can- 
not be neutral where any man is concerned 
— save at your peril. You have got to take 
an interest in him. You must recognize 
his status. The measure of your indiffer- 
ence is the measure of your guilt. 

There is nothing so ignoble and sinister 
as a neutral man going his way in the 
world — wrapped in cold and self-centered 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 41 

sufficiency ; heedless of the broken man by 
the wayside; heedless, too, of the happy 
fool smiling from an open window and the 
ragged child and the pale criminal slinking 
into an alley-way and the woman offering 
a glass of water — a neutral in life. 

I don't want you to punch anybody in 
the eye. I want you to take Mm by the 
hand, but if you can't take your fellow 
man by the hand, for Heaven's sake take 
him by the scruff of the neck, only take 
him — don't stalk past him in smug neu- 
trality. 

You'll not get rid of any of your duties 
to the Other by washing your hands in 
lukewarm water. 

Do you know who the unhappiest boy in 
the school is? Who the unhappiest man 
in the shop or office or drawing-room? 

The one who is treated as a neutral. It 
is a way of pouring contempt upon him; 
it is a way of depriving him of his inalien- 
able right to be reckoned with in the game 
of life. He has a right to be loved — and 
to be loved by you. And if, owing to your 
inadequacy in the art of loving your 
brother man, he is deprived of your love — 
by your fault, he has an imprescriptible 
right to demand that you show some in- 



42 TAKE IT FROM ME 

terest in him — even if, in your poor, dumb 
way, you have no other means of showing 
it save by punching him in the eye. 

This magnificent lesson your boy is 
learning, as he busies himself with the 
mysteries — they are almost occult — of the 
ball and stick. If he learns it well not all 
the stars in their courses can rob him of 
success in life — be he trader, thinker, steel- 
puddler or prophet — for he will have 
learned that life is collaboration with the 
Other Fellow. He will have learned how 
to know him. That means a great deal. 

You never fear anything but the un- 
known. 

Fear is due to the unexpected; and it is 
out of the unknown that the unexpected 
comes down upon you. Moreover it is only 
what you fear that you hate. Both these 
bad things are chased away by knowledge. 
When you know a man you can't fear him; 
when you know him you can't hate him; 
you may not approve him — that is evident 
— but you are tolerably certain to love him. 

Love and approbation are not one and 
the same thing; in fact, they are hope- 
lessly at odds as often as not. You will 
go on loving your son though now and 
then he makes you writhe with disappro- 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 43 

bation. And a decent love for the Other 
Fellow is by no means conditioned in ap- 
proval. I should like to approve of him 
at all times; I should like to admire his 
conduct — if he gave me the chance; but 
the fact that he stumbles is not going to 
take away my liking. As far as that goes, 
neither you nor I spend our lives with our 
own entire approval. 

Sport and Evolution 

Behind everything men do you can see 
the dim outline of a natural law. Strong 
as is the solidarity of man with man, it is 
no stronger than man's solidarity with 
nature. 

Darwin, in a footnote, pointed out that 
our descent from the little tidal creatures 
may account for the moon-pulse in all 
warm-blooded life. But more than the 
moon throbs in your veins. Infinite nature 
is beating there. 

At some moment of contest your courage 
and your intelligence are high. At such 
a moment I am not quite sure just how 
much credit you should give yourself; for 
both courage and intelligence were incited 
and stimulated by things high and vague 



44 TAKE IT FROM ME 

and far off, a modification of the atmos- 
phere, a sociologic evolution, the urge of 
ancestral impulses. 

Now I am bearing hard upon the ques- 
tion of games because I believe that in 
them you see most sharply outlined the 
law that binds you and your fellows. 

You remember the old ante-bellum 
science which went groping, half stifled, in 
a blind and dirty materialism. It had got 
hold of half a truth when it proclaimed 
that the principle of progress by selection 
— evolution if you will — was based on the 
"struggle for life." 

I, too, have laid emphasis on that half 
truth. A game is a struggle ; that is why it 
is good. Life is a struggle; that is why 
one should train one's self for conquest — 
and with glorious chivalry accord the Other 
Fellow his proud status as a belligerent. 
Every man is worth fighting because every 
man is worth loving — and no man living 
deserves the disdain that passes him by 
with indifference. 

But this is only a half truth — like Dar- 
win's little battle cry about the struggle 
for life — and a half truth is a poisonous 
and desolating thing. It destroys men 
as it destroys nations. It is the dark 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 45 

mother of war. Incidentally it is the 
mother of crowned words and pompons 
phrases. 

It is half true that the struggle for life 
lies at the basis of hnman evolution. The 
old materialistic scientists discerned this 
harsh half truth. But the new thinkers, 
instructed by the daily discoveries of 
science, have seen the great law more 
clearly; and they have given it a more 
pertinent name : i 6 The love of life. ' ' This 
is what science has to tell you. Behind all 
that is shaping life lies a law of love. 
Struggle is but a manifestation of it. 

That may not be the whole truth — for 
truth is a dazzling sun and our eyes have 
to be accustomed to it — but it is truth 
enough to light our way through the world 
and make clear our relations with our 
fellowmen. Progress is conditioned in 
love — in love of the universal life — and 
the struggle is a mere expression of it. 

Now take this big, clean truth as a meas- 
uring stick. 

Sport measures up well. It does not 
eliminate struggle — it ennobles it into 
kindly emulation. And above all, for here 
is the fact I want to make plain, it raises 
self-love into group-love. 



46 TAKE IT FROM ME 

I am not writing of the exhibition games 
grown men play for money, though there 
is justification even for them, if the games 
be played as high examples of how to do 
a thing well; my argument lies with the 
games of youth. And the thought may be 
summed up in this way : 

The first academy was an academy of 
athletic sports. You have not forgotten 
the hillside of Akademos, out beyond the 
suburb of the Potters. A great avenue of 
trees led to it and there the Athenians 
walked and talked in the pleasant hours, 
and strolled on to the gardens and the 
athletic field, where youth ran and wrestled 
and threw a ball. Came, too, the sculp- 
tors to study the human body in action 
that they might reproduce it in eternal 
marble. Magistrates and artists argued, 
and finally agreed that beauty and justice 
are but expressions of the same truth. 
Other old men spoke of the mysterious 
forces which were the souls of the gods 
of Greece. They talked of matter and 
spirit. Thus the athletic field became an 
academy where philosophic ideas were 
born. Alcibiades threw the discus. Soc- 
rates spoke immortal words, Plato listened 
and wrote, and idealism was born of the 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN SCHOOL 47 

games of the boxers and ball-players. 
Three things: the eternal trinity of the 
boy, the ball and the stick ; and out of them 
came all that made Greece great and beau- 
tiful and harmonious. 

Give youth its games. The academy 
should be the flower that grows in the field 
of athletics. And the reason I lay stress 
upon it is that there youth first — emerging 
from the warmth and light of home — meets 
the Other Boy; and upon that meeting 
hangs the issue, for good or ill, of his life 
on this planet. And I would have them 
meet, not in the cold arena of school prizes 
and book rewards, but in the sweat and 
dust and chivalry of the playground. It 
is there the heedless, hearty ardor of 
youth should meet — and give and take. 

Comes a day when the joy of youth gives 
way to a stronger joy of truth. And he 
can face it, victoriously, if he has learned 
the lesson of the ball and the stick and the 
Other Boy. 



Ill 

THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 



Ill 

THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 

IT was on the playground, you will have 
noticed, that I asked you to meet the 
Other Fellow first and not in the 
nursery. And for this I had an excellent 
reason. I frankly admit I look upon the 
nursery with a sort of awe, but I am not 
afraid of babies — what I am afraid of, in 
this connection, is getting sentimental. 

And take it from me: 

Most of the ills of life come from senti- 
mentality — from sentimentality and, I 
might add, from fat. If you will you can 
add cowardice to the dish and make an evil 
trinity of it. Decent living, then, consists 
in not being frightened, not being fat, and 
not being sentimental. 

Dirt, you know, is merely matter in the 
wrong place — and so is fat; and, in like 
wise, sentimentality is emotion out of 
place. Women know it ; all their lives they 
are making war on misplaced things. They 
51 



52 TAKE IT FROM ME 

are the natural enemies of dirt and senti- 
mentality. And one of their hardest tasks 
is managing (for his good) the male of 
the species, for most men fail to outgrow 
boyish habits of dabbling in dirt and mak- 
ing soppy mud pies of their affections. It 
is because I know I should get sentimental 
and make a fool of myself that I have 
kept, resolutely, out of the nurseries of 
life. It is no place for undeveloped man 
to go mooning about. But undeveloped 
man — the merest man — may listen with 
awe and profit at the nursery door. 

In many lands, at many a nursery door, 
I have stood and listened, acquiring wis- 
dom which I wish to share with you. 

I have learned, thus, more about mothers 
than about babies; which is well. 

You know that in storybooks mothers 
always behave better than any one else. 
Even so they do in nurseries. In the real 
sense of the word they are wonderful — 
their calm, masterful strength evokes won- 
der in the male. Dirt and sentimentality 
flee before them. But more wonderful 
than their masterfulness is their wisdom. 
It stands up like something naked and 
primeval. It daunts one by its absolute- 
ness. There is about it something ancient, 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 53 

universal, mysterious — as though the soul 
of a race spoke through it. World-over, in 
the nurseries of life, mothers speak two 
words — always in the same grave, sweet 
tone of voice. They are tremendous words ; 
they are occult words; they embody the 
entire philosophy of the race; they are as 
mysteriously significant as the flag of a 
nation. 

Listen at the door of an American 
nursery or an English nursery; always 
some mother, with monitory finger, is say- 
ing in the grave, sweet voice, to some infant 
Arthur or Mary-Elizabeth, those two cryp- 
tic words: "Be good." 

Be good! That admonition is a philos- 
ophy and religion and a moral code and 
a civil law; it is everything; it synthe- 
sizes the ultimate ideal of the Anglo-Saxon 
race — Goodness. Think how it has chimed 
and echoed in the brains and hearts of 
countless generations of English-speaking 
men and women — that nursery echo, going 
down through life with them, in grave, 
sweet mother tones : Be good ! Hour after 
hour of the days the mother voice has pro- 
claimed that ideal of goodness. Can you 
realize what it means to the race? It is 
the race ideal because it is the mother 



54 TAKE IT FROM ME 

ideal. Be good, Arthur; be good, Mary- 
Elizabeth; it is the flag and ideal, as it is 
the epic, of our race. 

Back in Greece, I am informed by a 
mother, who is also a doctor of philosophy, 
the advice given in the nursery was : l i Be 
comely. ' ' The ideal was to ko\6v — beauty 
and harmony of conduct ; and thus the race 
was fashioned. 

Always two words; always the wisdom 
of the race. 

When you listen at the door of the 
French nursery you hear the voice of the 
mother, saying gravely: "Sois-tu sage!" 
What she is saying is : ' ' Be wise ! ' ' 

Wisdom — 

It is the racial ideal of the clear-think- 
ing French mind; it is the first thing the 
little French child hears — this warning to 
be wise, to understand, to grasp the rela- 
tivity of things, to know that he is a sen- 
tient part of a sentient whole. And it is 
because the Frenchman has understanding 
that all other things have been added unto 
him — love and light and leadership ; it has 
made him the torchbearer of humanity. 
Sois-tu sage; it has taught him the highest 
reverence for the dignity of human life and 
human liberty and human love; liberie, 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 55 

egalite, fratemite — his holy trinity of 
ideals. 

And when I think of these brave and 
broadly human aspirations, incarnated in 
a nursery phrase, I do not quite know how 
to translate the words the German mother 
speaks to the little Hans of her heart, when 
she would guide his conduct, for what she 
says is: Sei artig. The words mean 
"be racial" — the idea they connote is that 
of race, clanship, though of course their 
advice to young Hans is to "be mannerly.' ' 

Anyway there they are : Sei artig. 

The mother words of the nursery are the 
law and ideal of the race; always, inex- 
orably, inevitably. 

Be comely, young Alcibiades. 

Be good, Mary-Elizabeth. 

Sois-tu sage, Jeanne-Marie. 

Sei artig, Hans. 

And I love the words I have heard in 
Russia, which is the land of a dark day 
and snow and cattle and men who pray, and 
is, therefore, the future. I stood by the 
nursery door and the mother was saying 
to her little son : " Be loving. ' ' That was 
the flag she gave him to walk the world 
with— his watchword in the "struggle for 
life. ,, It was this and nothing more; it 



56 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

was the ideal of her race; it was "Be lov- 
ing, Ivan" — as though she would give him 
a soul unselfed from the beginning of his 
little life. 



The Evil Trinity — and One More 

Whistler stood once looking at one of 
Carriere's misty pictures of a misty baby 
in a misty cradle; he stared at it through 
a cynical eye-glass; and to the painter he 
said: "Oh, Carriere, I see you've been 
smoking in the nursery !" 

It is a lesser liberty I have taken ; I have 
only listened at the nursery door and over- 
heard — do you not agree with me? — mat- 
ters of high purport. 

What we saw there was the Other Fel- 
low in the making; we saw the shaping of 
the races — humanity putting on form. 

Take this, if you will, from me : 

No words ever spoken by human voice 
carry so deep a message as those mother 
words of the race — they carry the future. 

I have written of the evil trinity of fat, 
fear and sentimentality; and you have 
read. They are all bad. Fat is dirt-matter 
out of place ; sentimentality is dirt on the 
emotional plane — it is emotion out of 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 57 

place ; and fear is dirt on the mental plane 
— it is thought out of place. Above all, 
beware of mental dirt; it is a profound 
and awesome truth that a fear once ut- 
tered is made more real — the peril draws 
nearer as it is named. Refuse to give it 
utterance and it goes away. 

To this dirty triad I shall add one more 
— and square them ; for with fat, fear and 
sentimentality one should route that evil 
little kinsman of theirs, laughter — the 
laughter that lessens, the laughter that 
hurts. 

Do you know why the mother words, of 
which something has been said, are so im- 
mensely significant I It is not only because 
they are iterated and reiterated until they 
become an integral part of the thinking 
mind and the feeling heart ; not only that ; 
it is because they are spoken without 
laughter. I am haunted by a little boy in 
Bavaria; it is from him I learned what 
shall here be written about laughter; and 
I am sorry you are pressed for time, for 
I should have liked you to linger here for 
awhile and meet the little boy of Bavaria 
— perhaps some other time. 

The laughter that belittles and the 
laughter that hurts — 



58 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Of course there are two kinds of every- 
thing and there are two kinds of laughter. 
I met another little boy in Moby Lane ; he 
was an acknowledged son of A. Neil 
Lyons; he spoke with discriminating dis- 
approval of a woman he met in a railway 
carriage, saying : 

"What's the matter wif her? I laughed 
at her free times an' she didn't laugh 
back." He meant the. smiling kind of 
laughter. 

It is the other laughter I have in mind — 
the kind that asserts a superiority to 
others. After my talks with the boy in 
Bavaria I tried to think out a philosophy 
of laughter. I didn't get very far. I 
know, as Lord Chesterfield knew, that sit- 
ting down where there is no chair pro- 
duces more laughter than the wittiest re- 
mark you can make. When that happens 
you laugh — you have let yourself be sur- 
prised by some apparent negligence in the 
laws of nature, at some apparent break in 
the cosmic mechanism, of which the Other 
Fellow is the victim. You do not laugh 
when you yourself sit down where there 
is no chair. Laughter is always aimed at 
a person or a thing ; you smile with people 
and you laugh at them. Therefore 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 59 

laughter is destined, I trust, to go the way 
of that evil little trinity of which you are 
sufficiently informed. 
Mothers do not laugh ; they smile. 

The Little Boy in Bavaria 

There was a street near my hotel in 
Munich, in ante-bellum days, where I used 
to walk and take the air. It was there I 
met the little boy in Bavaria. The first 
time I saw him he was a wet-eyed boy sit- 
ting on a stone ledge. I walked past him ; 
then I turned back and said ' ' Good morn- 
ing. ' ' He was very polite. He bowed and 
said to me: "Good morning, sir." I re- 
quested him not to call me sir, but doctor. 

"Are you a doctor V 9 he asked, suspi- 
ciously. 

"Certainly — I am a tear doctor," I re- 
plied. It was the next day, or perhaps 
the day after, we agreed he should call me 
"Old Doctor Philo," though I wasn't keen 
on the adjective. However, I became his 
Old Doctor Philo and we met nearly every 
day and discussed affairs in general and I 
learned many things. One day we were 
walking near his house when he said ab- 
ruptly — after emitting a long breath: 



60 TAKE IT FROM ME 

"Well, I must go in and see my 
father." 

"Good," I said, "so I will leave you 
here." 

"Oh, please," said the little boy in 
Bavaria, "come with me, for I must go in 
and see my father." 

One of the dirty trinity was tugging at 
him and it was not sentimentality; it was 
fear. 

"Oh, please," and he put his arm up 
round my waist and led me into the house. 
He was a very young boy, slim and gentle, 
tall for his age, with a white face and 
serious eyes. I did not know his father 
then, though all the world knows him, for 
he is a very famous man, many times a 
doctor, omnifarian doctus, a scientist and 
scholar. That day — I see him as though 
in a picture — he sat in a big chair with 
a tall back, beside a little round table lit- 
tered with books and papers. He was a 
long, thin man, with a studious face and 
a partly bald head; what hair he had was 
gray and yellow and that was the color of 
his thick, straggling mustache; he was 
dressed in gray clothes, and his long legs — 
ending in gray slippers — stuck out straight 
before him. We entered the room softly, 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 61 

the boy in Bavaria pressing close to my 
side, with one arm round my waist. The 
learned man half -turned his head and eyed 
us over the back of the chair. What he 
said was: "Ah! I suppose this is your 
'Old Doctor Philo.' " 

And with that out of the gray-and-yellow 
man there came a blast of laughter — so 
merry, so hard and gay, so cold and hostile 
to humanity — that the boy in Bavaria 
wilted up against me in sheer physical 
chill. 

Then I understood. 

I understood why a boy sat wet-eyed 
on a stone ledge in Bavaria ; I understood 
why he said: "Oh, please, I must go in 
and see my father.' ' That scientist, that 
portent of a man, had a sense of humor, 
which is an awful thing for a man of science 
to have. He laughed because childhood 
was not identically like his manhood; he 
laughed at childhood's amusing ignorance 
of the cosmic system — its hopeful way of 
sitting down where there is no chair; and, 
laughing, he was gloriously aware that he 
was wiser than the childhood at which he 
laughed. 

Have you ever been laughed at by a 
scientist? 



62 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Then you know the fierce, deep and 
blighting power of laughter. 

It is all very well to laugh and have the 
world laugh with you, as in the famous 
song, if you and the world are not laugh- 
ing at the Other Fellow — at his tragic en- 
deavors to sit down where there is no chair. 
Gayety of heart is charming; the joy of 
life that bubbles over is wholesome; but 
they have nothing to do with the laughter 
aimed at men and things — there is bitter 
cruelty in laughing at men and to laugh at 
cosmic mechanism is sheer idiocy. Where- 
fore have a care of your laughter; if you 
are laughing because you are alive it is 
all right; but if you are laughing because 
the Other Fellow has fallen on his nose, 
it is all wrong. There was once a man 
named Zeuxis ; they showed him a portrait 
of an old woman — the poor old face fa- 
tigued by the years, the dim, watery eyes, 
the toothless mouth, all the scantness and 
tremor of age were pictured there; and 
Zeuxis, looking at the portrait, laughed 
himself to death — and the world was bet- 
ter, cleaner, richer for his going. His was 
the bad kind of laughter. I have no words 
fierce enough to blast it with. The man 
who would laugh in an old woman's home, 



THE WISDOM OF THE NURSERY 63 

would find something to laugh at in the 
nursery — and that is falling into the abyss 
of cynicism. 

More and more, as I go through life, I 
try to wean myself from laughing at the 
Other Fellow — even when he is fat. 

Even when — like the little boy in Bavaria 
— he is sentimental. 

It is a lesson I learned from listening 
at nursery doors. 



IV 
THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 



IV 
THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 

I AM sorry for those who go to sea 
in ships with rotten gear, bnt I begin 
to fear for them only when I know 
the crew is unfriendly. And I feel much 
the same way when I look at a boy; he is 
just beginning life ; he may become almost 
anything; he may sail almost anywhere — 
but it all depends on the crew. It all de- 
pends on his friends and associates. 

No one can "go it alone.' ' 

Rastignac, that insufferable adventurer, 
came up to Paris (you will find him in 
Balzac) declaring his "success should be 
owing entirely to his own merits/ ' and in 
a little while he was begging for lumps 
of sugar, like a lapdog. The fellow who 
wants to owe everything to himself is al- 
ready a bankrupt. The richest man in the 
world, said the Greek, is he who has most 
friends. 

I was in a drawing-room, the other day, 
67, 



68 TAKE IT FROM MB 

where an aged man sat, talking about 
medieval astrologers and the games they 
played with the stars. It seems they could 
read your birth story in the zodiac. All 
of which was not very interesting until he 
said: "They would tell you to look for 
the greatest good of your life, for your 
Greater Fortune — Fortunam Major em — in 
the eleventh house of the horoscope, which 
is the House of Friends." 

When this information was given me I 
ceased to sneer at the medieval gentlemen 
in conical caps and spangled robes; they 
were wise; and their truth is my truth: 
Your great good fortune is in the House 
of your Friends. 

If I can say a practical word on this 
subject I want to say it here. 

It is when he comes as friend or com- 
panion that the Other Fellow is most im- 
portant. And there is a distinction, I be- 
lieve, between friendship and companion- 
ship, which one ought to get clear. In 
friendship there is something predestined. 
Out of a thousand men there is one who 
gets under your skin. The others are all 
right. You have a kindly f raternalism for 
them, as a bee has for his brother, the bee. 
But one of them — who seemingly differs 



THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 69 

not a whit from the others — is your friend. 
And the odd thing is that you did not make 
him — you found him. It is precisely be- 
cause it is predestined that friendship is 
at once mysterious and precious. That is 
why your boy looks on it as a sacred thing. 
You can't understand what he sees in the 
grubby, repellant boy he walks with and 
talks with — mysteriously — and cherishes. 
And you say to yourself: "If he'd only 
keep away from my Sid I should be glad. ' ' 

But your Sid is wiser than you are. 
Where you see a grubby boy whose boots 
are run down at the heel — an unhandker- 
chiefed boy — Sid sees a friend. To him 
he can say everything. In those mysteri- 
ous talks at which you wonder Sid is telling 
the grubby boy of his hopes and dreams 
and misgivings — all the knight-errantries 
of the spirit. And here is the amazing 
thing : Your Sid did not select that friend, 
as he selects a necktie ; no, the grubby boy 
came up out of life like a sudden star — 
like a splendid adventure — 

It is the way all friends appear. You 
do not make them — you meet them. And 
you know them at first sight ; they become 
at once William, or James, or Oliver, or 
Andrew — the friend. 



70 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Your Sid is not the only one. 

I do not believe there is a human being 
crawling in the muddiest gutter of life, 
who has not one of these allies. 

Yesterday in the Cahuengo Pass I saw 
two tramps, with dirty packs. One was 
a tall, shambling man ; the other was short 
and greasy and abominable — he hobbled; 
both were ragged and dirty and their faces 
were deformed with the bloat of drink and 
disease and evil living. As they shuffled 
along the road the tall tramp glanced down 
at his fellow and — it was an impulsive 
gesture — patted the little man's shoulder, 
as one who should say: "Courage, little 
man, you are not alone !" And I knew 
they were more than men who walk along 
a road together. They were friends; in 
the dirt and shame and barren evil of their 
lives they had met — two Lazars, who were 
richer than Dives, for he, in his feasting, 
was alone. 

Man invented every science except 
mathematics — that he found ready to his 
hand. It was waiting for him when he 
sat down on one hill and looked at another. 
And this strangely sacred sort of friend- 
ship, whereof I am writing, is not a thing 
of your creation — you simply recognize it. 



TEE OTHEE FELLOW AS A FRIEND 71 

And I cannot tell yon when to look for it. 
If you have found it you are rich; if not 
you may be sure it waits for you some- 
where further down the turnpike. The 
really great adventure in life is meeting 
that Other Fellow, who is your predestined 
friend. He may go afoot; he may wear a 
rusty coat ; he may be sitting on a wayside 
stone; but you will not pass him by — in 
some occult way you will get his signal, 
and say : 

" Hello, old friend, so IVe found you 
at last — and, by the way, who are you?" 

And he will look up and grin and make 
answer: "Why, bless your heart, old 
Doctor Philo, I am a little boy in Bavaria 
— and IVe been waiting here eleven years 
for you. ,, 

Which is a glorious adventure, at once 
sacred and mysterious. 

The Ship's Crew 

It is a fair distinction, is it not! There 
is a wide difference between friendship 
and companionship, though in both you 
have to reckon with the Other Fellow. I 
think, perhaps, you can get at it in this 
way: Friendship is a spiritual thing; 



72 TAKE IT FROM ME 

companionship is one of the plain, every- 
day, practical things you have to know a 
great deal abont if yon are not to make a 
mess of your life. You pick and choose 
your companions; and in selecting them 
you define yourself — proclaim yourself — 
announce what sort of a man you are going 
to be. 

The moment I see what sort of a crew 
you have shipped I know about what kind 
of a voyage you will make. 

The sort of friend I have been describ- 
ing is "wished on" you — by some obscure 
strategy of evolution — but the Other Fel- 
lows you run with, ride with, work with, 
play with, are, in the main, of your own 
choosing. 

Friends often quarrel; splendid differ- 
ences often divide you from your friend; 
it is one of the essential rites of friend- 
ship; but no sane man quarrels with his 
companions. Why should he? He has 
picked them out and — unless he is a maniac 
— he has chosen them for union and not 
for discord. Take your own case; you 
know tolerably well what you are about; 
and when you selected your companions 
you knew you were entering into a kind 
of give-and-take partnership with them, 



THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 73 

that you and they were fellow stockholders 
in that complex business association — the 
mutuality of life — they are all of your own 
choosing; wherefore your responsibility 
stands up like a mountain — your respon- 
sibility toward them and toward yourself. 
I do not know who your companions are. 
I do not know what Other Fellow you are 
jogging on with just at present; but this 
I know: There are moments when his 
ideals droop and sag — precisely as yours 
do. There are times when he feels like 
breaking the windows and muddying the 
wells of life. You, of course, are that sort 
of fellow, too. He is quite as much justi- 
fied in watching you as you are in keeping 
a wary eye on him. And it is in this per- 
petual watchfulness of the Other Fellow 
that you get the real benefit there is in 
intelligent companionship. You get your 
lesson from him, and he gets a lesson from 
you. 

A man's enemies never hurt him; they 
hurt only themselves — for hate returns 
like a boomerang to smash the hand that 
hurled it ; but the man who blunders in his 
companionship is pretty certain to pull 
down on his head all the ills of the zodiac. 
True companionship is based upon two 



74 TAKE IT FROM ME 

things — not one; it is based upon mutual 
service and mutual watchfulness. 

It is so easy to wallow in sentiment — 
it is as easy as being fat. And you can 
make a hundred books — and all good ones 
— out of loving the Other Fellow. For my 
part I want you to love him — it is the one 
thing I want. Go on — love him, love him 
without intermission, love him trium- 
phantly ; but watch him like a hawk ! as you 
watch yourself. In the human game of 
give and take it is love you want to get 
from him — not scarlet fever ; and it is love 
you want to give the Other Fellow — not 
the germs of bad living you may be carry- 
ing about with you. One cannot hammer 
too hard on the truth that the love you 
owe the Other Fellow should not be mawk- 
ish and should not be blind. It should be 
as wise and alert as a pet fox. The Other 
Fellow is as good as you are, but he is 
no better; and I dare say you will admit 
you could do with a bit of watching your- 
self, now and then. So can he. In fact, I 
am a stanch believer in this pet-fox theory 
of life. If you have ever had a pet fox 
you know he is a loving little beast and you 
love him; but even when he is drowsing 
in your lap and, presumably, musing over 



THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 75 

all the vulpine virtues, you keep a watch- 
ful eye on him. 

Loving the Other Fellow doesn't mean 
being an idiot. 

The Bloody Bander chief 

The Other Fellow is bound to be a bit 
of a mystery to you. Perhaps that is a 
good thing, too. If you could go into him 
and walk through him with a lighted candle 
and look into all hid dark corners he 
would cease to be the eternally interesting 
problem he is. 

All my life-long Other Fellows have been 
amazing me — though I must admit IVe 
amazed myself tolerably often. Time and 
again IVe sat down with Other Fellows 
for a little rational conversation and found 
jnyself, abruptly, plunged into a black pit 
of mystery — a profound pit without a bot- 
tom to it. 

I remember once — 

It was in Liguria ; it was in a little city 
in the obscure hills; I was sitting at a 
tavern table with five men. We had eaten 
together. We sat smoking in a friendly 
way, without much conversation. Over the 
table hung a brass Ligurian lamp with 



76 TAKE IT FROM ME 

three burning wicks. It made a pool of 
light round us. The rest of the room was 
filled with shadows. As we sat there, at 
peace with each other and with the world, 
the street door opened slowly and quietly. 
A man came in out of the night. He was 
dressed in the rough, stiff] black clothes 
Italian peasants go holidaying in and was 
wearing a great hat of thick, black felt. 
Not one of the five men looked at him. No 
one spoke to him. He came up into the 
circle of light, took a blood-drenched hand- 
kerchief from his pocket and threw it down 
on the wooden table. Then, without a 
word, he went out — leaving the door open 
on the night. One by one the five men 
got up, found their hats, and followed him 
into the darkness. Not a word was spoken. 
For a little while I sat perfectly still 
looking at the handkerchief. It was not 
stained, but drenched, as though it had 
been dipped in blood; and the blood oozed 
out and was sopped up in the deal of the 
table. Then I knocked on the stone floor, 
with my heel ; there was no response ; the 
old woman who had cooked the dinner did 
not answer; the tall girl who had served 
the dinner did not come ; no one came. I 
went to the door and looked out. There 



THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 77 

was no one in the street of the little stone 
city; the lights in the house had been put 
out I heard the sound of men's feet run- 
ning swiftly down the stony mountain 
road. That was all. What it meant I do 
not know. I had looked, unwittingly, into 
some dark abyss of the Other Fellow — into 
the blackness of a profound mystery. And 
slowly, looking over my shoulder at the 
night, I went my way. 

The Pet-Fox Theory 

It is not that I am warning you against 
the Other Fellow. He is certainly rather 
mysterious at times ; often it is difficult to 
know what he would be about as he goes 
his pragmatic way. The point I would 
make is that it is your duty — both to him 
and to yourself — to know precisely what 
he is about. 

The right attitude toward him is one of 
love; to be sure; but loving your fellow 
man in the abstract is all rubbish — it is 
the sort of thing that precipitates you into 
all the cant of the big words. It is as an 
individual he has a right to your regard 
and it is as an individual you have to know 
him — which requires common sense. When 



78 TAKE IT FROM ME 

you come into association with the Other 
Fellow your first duty is to get a sane and 
generous understanding of him. Love 
based on fatuous emotionalism will do you 
no good — or him. There are all sorts of 
things I might do for the tramp on the 
road. The one thing I am not going to 
do is to take him in my arms and hold 
him lovingly to my heart, while he sheds 
his dirt and fleas and vice habits and drink 
habits upon me. And I do not want 
the Other Fellow to come, mysteriously, 
and plop down his bloody handkerchief on 
my dinner table. 

Meeting the Other Fellow is a perfectly 
normal thing; it is in nature, as Vice 
would say; there is no need of getting 
maudlin over it. And the common-sense 
way is the right way — know him first and 
with knowledge love will come. 

You pick your companions; you select 
your associates; and in that business you 
should be as wise as a pet fox, for — this 
time you may take it from me — sooner or 
later you are bound to love the man you 
associate with. 

There are exceptions? 

There are no exceptions; there are only 
degrees; the better you know the Other 



THE OTHER FELLOW AS A FRIEND 79 

Fellow the closer you are pulled to him. 
Sooner or later you will want to hug him 
to your heart. Boys who loaf in barrooms 
learn to love the other barroom loafers — 
which carries a touch of divine beauty into 
these sordid halls. The second-story man 
is loved for the real self in him by some 
poor thief who holds the ladder. Every 
one is loved, simply because human asso- 
ciation creates human love. And that is 
where the danger lies — especially for a man 
at the beginning of life. 

That boy Sid of yours is a case in point. 

He can get his companions only out of 
his environment — out of the boys with 
whom he runs or sits under the hedge. 
They are his share of the world. They are 
the part of humanity with which he has 
to do his loving. You are not a snob be- 
cause you want him to love the best. On 
the contrary, you are a sane " Lover of 
Humanity.' ' You have wisely decided it 
is better for you and Sid and all mankind 
that this Sid of yours should get his educa- 
tion at Princeton rather than at Sing Sing. 

And if that be snobbery make the most 
of it! 

No; there are two ways of meeting the 
Other Fellow — and only one way is right. 



80 TAKE IT FROM ME 

You must approach him knowingly, with 
a sunny determination to hug him to your 
heart, just as soon as you have made sure 
he doesn't need a bath. If he's dirty — 
bathe him first before making a companion 
of him — for your sake, for his sake and for 
the sake of the community. 



V 

THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 



5! 

THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 

YOU cannot do business alone. 
Yon cannot make a living alone. 
In the prison where he lay for 
debt and kindred insolvencies of conduct 
Mirabeau had time to think things over; 
and he said : 

6 1 1 know but three ways of living in this 
world: by wages for work, by begging, 
thirdly by stealing — so-named or not so- 
named. ' ' 

If you analyze that statement you will 
see that it is wholly exact. Always you 
get your livelihood out of the Other Fel- 
low. Your work may be to raise indigo, 
or cattle, and your payment may come from 
some far-off merchant who has never 
heard your name ; but the money he sends 
you is your wage for the work you have 
done in your fields or in your cattle sheds. 
He who paints a picture or writes a song 
is working for a wage. Mirabeau spoke 
83 



84 TAKE IT FROM ME 

the truth. There is no other right way of 
living in this world — you must work for 
the Other Fellow and take his wage. This 
is the very essence, if you like to put it that 
way, of the economic history of mankind. 
Civilization is nothing but man's per- 
sistent attempt to establish the law that 
right living is by wage for work. At the 
root of every war — at the heart of every 
revolution — you will see man's protest 
against the existence of those who have 
chosen the wrong ways of living in this 
world. He protests and he rebels against 
those who live by begging or by stealing — 
so-named or not so-named. His battle has 
been a long one and the end of it is not 
yet, but you have only to look abroad in 
the world to see how much he has gained. 
The nations have not yet learned the law 
of right living. There are still nations — 
imperfectly and one-sidedly developed — 
that fancy they can live by conquest and 
invasion. They still believe their way of 
prosperity lies over the ruined factories, 
flooded mines and decimated populations 
of neighboring states. The individual man, 
in his less developed period, thought the 
same way. He was the raider and riever, 
the man who fires his neighbor's hayrick. 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 85 

Experience taught him, as it is teaching 
the nations, the inherent folly of it. He 
saw the grotesque mistake he was making 
in fancying he could grow rich by taking 
riches from other men. Little by little it 
was driven in on him that the only way 
to grow rich is to make others rich. 

This is the law which lies, like a rock, 
under modern business. 

Men cannot get rich by taking riches 
from other men. Nations cannot become 
prosperous by depriving other nations of 
prosperity. Men and nations increase in 
prosperity, precisely in proportion to the 
increase made by other men and nations. 

I think you may read the story of civil- 
ization in this attempt, manifold and 
tragic, to get rid of the two wrong ways 
of living in the world — by begging or steal- 
ing, so-named or not — and to establish the 
law of work for wages. Many of the at- 
tempts have been pathetic in their futility. 
You have not forgotten Tolstoi's theory of 
' 'bread-work' ' — that each man should do 
manual work enough to provide his daily 
bread and livelihood. His error was that 
he fancied one kind of work was nobler 
than another. He fancied it was nobler 
to plow a field than to cast up accounts. 



86 TAKE IT FKOM ME 

There is no relative ignobility in work, 
provided it be work done for a wage. It 
is sheer sentimentality to set plowing 
above bookkeeping, just as it is impudent 
snobbishness to set bookkeeping above 
plowing. And this sentimentality and 
this snobbishness underlie a great deal of 
the loose thinking of the Tolstoi-minded 
people. 

There is only one right way of living: 

Work for wage. 

In other words it is doing work so bene- 
ficial to the Other Fellow that when it is 
done he will pay the wage. 

Is that clear? 

Then what room is there for any snob- 
bish dispute as to the relative nobility of 
this kind of work or the other kind. The 
test of the nobility of any work is that it 
is useful to others — so useful they keep 
you at it by the reward of a wage. (Do 
not jump at the idea that wages are always 
paid in money.) 

On the other hand all your complicated 
systems of jurisprudence grew out of 
man's endeavor to check the bad ways of 
living — those by begging and by the multi- 
ple and cryptic forms of stealing. There 
are beggars on thrones ; there are stealers, 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 87 

who sit in banks as custodians of the sav- 
ings of the people. In fact, these two bad 
types of humanity flit about everywhere 
in Protean disguises. You and I are op- 
timists just because civilization is making 
their bad ways of life more and more un- 
productive — that is what the vague word 
progress means. 

This is a material world in which men 
eat chops and wear out material shoe- 
leather; it is a business world, doing 
business — first — in material things. Now, 
I believe it has learned the mighty lesson, 
among men, that only by making the Other 
Fellow rich can you become rich — only by 
the increase of his prosperity can you 
become prosperous — and your only chance 
of living well yourself is by working for 
the wage he pays, 

Bread-work and Wage-work 

I am stating the case broadly — in its 
most general aspect. When you go into a 
new country it is not until you have stood 
on a hilltop and looked around that you go 
down into the valley roads. What is 
needed first of all is an understanding of 
work and wage. The noblest natures are 



88 TAKE IT FROM ME 

the most compassionate; and Tolstoi be- 
lieved that compassion of man for man 
was the remedy for the evils and anguish 
of human life. He would have each 
man do his daily " bread- work' ' — for two 
hours, for three hours — so that the rest 
of his time might be free to work for 
others. 

And it was precisely at this point that 
his second error came in. 

All work is work for others. If it be 
work in which there is any profit it must 
be work for others. Work and wage are 
so intimately associated you cannot think 
of one without thinking of the other. 

It was long ago — it was in the wolf -gray 
dawn of civilization — that man made things 
for himself ; that he squatted in his swamp 
or cave and worked for himself; social 
evolution is nothing but the movement 
which takes man away from his cave and 
his quern — away from the isolation and 
work for self. Work for one's self is a silly 
and bootless thing, for no man can pay 
himself his own wage. He can't be his 
own paymaster. 

Work that brings no wage is not work. 

It may be a game or a sport ; it may be 
anything you please, but it is not work 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 89 

unless it be done for others and so well 
done that they will pay for it. 

The only test of good work is that it is 
paid for — by the Other Fellow. 

It is the wages that justifies the work, 
proclaims the work, and crowns it. 

If your work hasn't in it the essential 
quality of being good for the Other Fellow, 
he will not pay for it. Why should hef 
And then it becomes wageless work, which 
is a monstrous thing — like a man without 
a face. 

Most of our confused thinking comes 
from the misuse of words. That good word 
Work has got itself tangled up with many 
subordinate ideas that have, in reality, 
very little to do with it. You and I, at all 
events, need do no muddled thinking about 
so plain a matter. We can at least define 
the word with some degree of precision. 
For instance : Work is something done for 
others which they want done — and will pay 
for. It is a wage-worthy thing. It is 
something done for others in the hope of 
a reward from others. What else is there 
to it? Take away the hope and there is 
left merely drudgery of a kind so deadly 
it was really invented for the punishment 
of criminals — thus in the most dreadful 



90 TAKE IT FROM ME 

penal institutions the convicts are set to 
shift heaps of sand from one side of the 
yard to the other, and back again. This 
sand- shifting is not work but torment. It 
is without hope of wage ; but more desolat- 
ing still is the knowledge the convict has 
that there is in it no profit for others. It 
is barren drudgery devised by maliceful 
men. 

And so we have reached, I trust, a cer- 
tain clear understanding of what work is : 
It is something done for others in the hope 
of a reward; and the joy of work lies in 
the nearness of a reward — the certainty of 
the hope 's fulfillment. Always work is done 
for the Other Fellow; always he pays the 
wage ; and the joy of work is in your hope 
of reward. If you haven't that hope it is 
because you know your work is not worth 
the wage. And in the end you will sink 
down into drudgery and add to the waste 
of human wreckage and the sum of human 
anguish. 

What the Other Fellow Wants 

And what should your work in the world 
be! 
That is up to you, but one thing is cer- 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 91 

tain: there must "be joy in it. And you 
will do any kind of work joyfully if you 
like the wage — if you go on hoping for the 
reward. This is the lesson life is trying 
to teach you from the beginning. It is 
what the voices in the nursery are saying. 
You hear it in the clash and fervor of 
games. 

I do not say that the work and the wage 
are one, but they trot together like the 
hoofs of a horse — they back up against each 
other like the two sides of a coin. When 
you decide what wage you want you will 
have determined the kind of work you are 
to do. There is one other factor in the 
problem; and only one. This unknown 
quantity — this X in the problem — is the 
Other Fellow, he who pays. He has a 
compelling voice in the discussion. 

Your choice, after all, is limited. It lies 
between the workshop of life and the waste- 
heap of human wreckage, between the 
wage-worthy work and the drudgery of 
shifting sand-piles in a prison yard. What 
kind of work you are to do will be de- 
cided, in the main, by the Other Fellow. 
It will be determined largely by his need. 
It is in his need — whether it be of bread 
or shoes or spiritual enlightment — that 



92 TAKE IT FROM ME 

your opportunity lies. And the art of 
right living, which is successful living, 
consists in finding out what the Other Fel- 
low wants — in getting so close to him you 
can discover, by a sort of vicarious sym- 
pathy, what work he needs done for a 
wage. 

And he is the one to decide? 

Always he is the one to decide; from 
the core of my soul I believe he knows his 
needs and what is best to be done; for he 
is humanity, he is Alter Me, he is the Other 
Fellow and right well he knows whither 
he is going. When you go his way you 
are going with evolution and not against 
it. The impulse that carries him on is the 
impulse to perfect himself. The work he 
wants done is work that will help him in 
his endless development and for no other 
work will he pay a wage. His ideal is 
growth — growth in wisdom and beauty; 
and if he demands that you shall build for 
him a clean house, with tall, bright win- 
dows, it is that his ideal should have a fit- 
ting home. 

Of a certainty you can trust the Other 
Fellow. He knows what he wants. Your 
only problem is to give it to him. 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 93 

The Man Next Door 

Going into business is no longer a matter 
of wild adventure — like taking out letters 
of marque and sailing into unknown seas. 
Boats in the air and under the sea, whis- 
pering Hertzian waves, have linked you 
close with most of the men on this planet, 
but it is still a fact that the Other Fellow 
with whom you have to do business lives 
next door — or in the next street. Your 
wage is in his pocket. If you see the 
world truthfully, and not as an arena for 
financial witchcraft and spells, you will see 
that the great things that have been done 
for the Other Fellow — and for which he 
has royally paid — had their origin in nat- 
ural collaboration with the man next door. 
They were neighborhood affairs. 

A few mechanics who clubbed their sav- 
ings gave Henry Ford his start in what is 
now his huge business of making automo- 
biles; and that enormous creation, Stand- 
ard Oil, grew out of the neighborhood 
confidence a few Other Fellows had in 
John D. Eockefeller. There are excep- 
tions, but I think you may take it from 
me that your work waits for you in your 
own street. It is in the keeping of the man 



94 TAKE IT FROM ME 

next door. Whither it will lead you I know 
not. It may widen across the world, but 
if you cannot see the need — and wage — of 
the Other Fellow at your elbow you will 
have small chance of finding your fortune 
in far-off lands. Tacitus speaks terribly 
of "the sea covered with exiles' ' — plenum 
Exiliis mare — and what is terrifying in 
the phrase is the picture one gets of de- 
fiant men fleeing from the needs and duties 
and laws of home, seeking the adventures 
and piracies of alien seas. I have known 
many of the wasters of the world. I have 
found them afloat on all waters — drifting 
with the tides. I have seen them washed 
up on many shores. Always they were' 
the loose men who had not the faculty of 
attaching themselves to a community. 
And there is the lesson: 

Your road to success begins at your own 
front door ; and there you must drive your 
first stake. 

Have you ever talked to old millionaires, 
as they sat by the fire and stirred the logs 
of old memories? They are the men who 
saw success in terms of money. The wage 
they worked for was counted out to them 
in dollars and cents. Now I have not met 
one of them who could not point out that 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 95 

the beginning of his work — and reward — 
was at home. It was from the man next 
door he got his first wage. These old mil- 
lionaires showed a rare competency in liv- 
ing the kind of life they thought best 
worth while. They got the highest wage 
for their particular kind of work. And I 
think you may take it from them that your 
opportunity for acquiring riches lies — not 
in Timbuctoo — but in your own back yard. 

And this brings us straight to the ques- 
tion: 

What are you in business for? 

To acquire riches? 

I do not wish to fall into a slough of 
economic contention and you do not wish 
to be dragged in it. 

Money is fluidic. And the fact that its 
flow may be checked — that powerful men 
may divert the common stream and draw 
it off into private land-locked lakes — lends 
itself to violent denunciation. Anyway 
for you and me this discussion is academic. 
You are not going to acquire riches in the 
gigantic way one dams up a river and 
makes a lake of it. Even in humanity's 
worst days — and these are not the best — 
that sort of desperate money-greed is ex- 
ceptional. The financial lake builder falls 



96 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

outside the lines of this plain and practical 
discussion. Abnormal, menacing, centrip- 
etal, he swings out of the orbit of the 
average man, and the average man — of 
whom God made millions — has not quite 
made up his mind what to do about it. 
What you are in business for is a wholly 
normal matter. You are there to get your 
just wages. You translate it into a roof, 
food, shoes for the children and garments 
for the wife. And, drawing your wage, 
you say proudly: " Thank heaven, I am 
independent ! ' ' 

A glorious thing! 

What is the meaning of it, save this: 
Your independence is due entirely to your 
dependence upon others — the greater your 
dependence upon them, the freer you are. 
This is not a paradox. It is a blunt and 
formidable truth. It is the starkest and 
boldest kind of common sense. If I get my 
livelihood by selling boiled beans my in- 
dependence consists in persuading a mil- 
lion men to eat them. Everything you call 
civilization, from railways to postage 
stamps, is nothing but an attempt to realize 
this natural law of organized society — in- 
terdependence. It has brought men into 
such intimate relations that mutual service 



THE OTHER .FELLOW IN BUSINESS 97 

is a law of life — as of the tennis court; 
wherever the service is not only mutual 
but unselfish there is profit. When capi- 
tal and labor fall to rioting in the streets 
there is one common wrong beneath it all 
and that wrong is selfishness. Your only 
way to independence is along the road of 
dependence upon the Other Fellow and 
of interdependence with Other Fellows. 
Then, it is all very well to "know your- 
self, ' ' but what is of .fierce and immediate 
importance is to know the Other Fellow. 
I do not say your destiny is in his hands 
— that makes for exaggeration; but I do 
say that your success in business and your 
comfort in life, your usefulness and your 
wage are in his hand and no other. Of 
course you have heard this truth before 
now. Every one has heard it — seen it — 
met it. It is a loud and luminous plati- 
tude. But when it has been driven home 
to your understanding — when it has be- 
come part of your subconscious thought — 
life has a strange new thrill in it. 

What! that Other Fellow, he with the 
blue suit and the yellow shoes, has got my 
business in his pocket? 

And you look at him with new eyes. A 
new sympathy ties you to him. He is no 



98 TAKE IT FROM ME 

longer a mere man sitting cocked up on an 
office stool. He is one of the custodians 
of your fortune. He is one of your col- 
laborators in the business of life. And you 
cannot cross a man in the street without 
the new thrill of excitement: " Hello, 
here comes another partner !" Just what 
role he is to play in your life you do not 
know; he may not appear again until the 
last act ; he may be waiting, even now, for 
his cue; all you know is the exciting and 
mysterious fact that you and he are play- 
ing parts in the same drama. When you 
look at him this way no man is a stranger. 
He may not be your brother, for brother- 
liness is a very holy thing, but he is that 
person, incalculably important to you, the 
man with whom you must do business. At 
first glance you may not think much of 
him; he may have the look of a man of 
broken boots and broken fortunes; but 
your fortune is in his hands. 

Sum it all up : 

There is only one way of right living, 
and that is by wages for work. 

The only paymaster is the Other Fellow. 
It is only when he finds your work worth 
while that he will pay a wage. He gives 
you every chance to choose the work you 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 99 

find a joy in and it is only when you have 
failed to find the work that meets his need 
that he sends yon to the drudgery of life, 
in which there is no joy. Therefore it 
is that right living — the successful way of 
conducting the business of life — is merely 
getting so close to the Other Fellow you 
can discover his real and intimate needs. 

Again, the Other Fellow doesn't live in 
Timbuctoo \ he lives next door and in the 
next street — your barber shaves his chin 
and you sit beside him every time you ride 
in a street car. The road to success goes 
past your own front door. And success? 
Call it independence, if you please. It will 
be great or small just in proportion to 
your dependence upon others. The first 
man you meet — the man next door — has 
a bit of your wage in his pocket. 

Go get it — that's business. 

Hoarding the Superfluous 

When you do " bread- work' ' you get 
your wage in bread. This is just and equit- 
able payment. You carry home your loaf 
and sit at table with the wife and chil- 
dren of your house and eat the daily 
bread. In your maddest fever you can- 



100 TAKE IT FROM ME 

not conceive of yourself storing loaf after 
loaf in your garret until the walls crack; 
or burying it in a pit in the cellar. When 
you read of such a man, you say finally: 
"He was mad." Such a madman, to the 
shame of civilization, was seen in the dark 
winter of 1897. He was a speculator in the 
bread men eat for life's sake. In order 
to keep up the price of grain on the world's 
market, he sank in the sea millions of 
bushels of wheat. This man who destroyed 
the food of humanity had received, by 
baptism or otherwise, the name of Joseph, 
which means "the custodian of bread." 
At the same time other men — whose heads 
were not stricken from their shoulders — 
used wheat as a fuel for their stoves and 
engines ; and, on far-off edges of the world 
hunger cried aloud and poor men starved. 

Mad, you say; hoarder and waster of 
bread are mad alike. 

And he who takes his wage in money? 

Is he saner when he hoards it until his 
garrets crack or sows it on the sea? 

The right to riches is inscribed in all 
the codes— except the code of common 
sense. Common sense goes on repeating 
that no one has a right to the superfluous. 
Eight stops with the necessary; and when 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 101 

you pass that line you have got into the 
realm of privilege. No man has a right 
to be rich. He may have the privilege if 
society, organizing itself according to 
queer codes, grants it. That is all. And 
it is a dark truth that all spiritual teachers, 
wiser than the codes, have associated in 
an obscure fellowship the ideas of wealth 
and evil. The court preacher of Louis XIV 
tried to reassure his wealthy parishioners 
by explaining that when it was said no 
rich man should enter the kingdom of 
heaven, the bad rich man was meant. Of 
course, the epithet was a mere invention 
of the court preacher. He who incurred 
that doom of exclusion was the "rich man" 
and no unnecessary word was said about 
his goodness or badness. And the common 
sense of humanity has defined the "rich 
man" as one who collects more than he 
needs for the development of his material, 
intellectual and spiritual life. 

You cannot get it out of the popular 
mind that there is something at once peril- 
ous and ignoble in the "rich man's" pos- 
session of the superfluous. And an uni- 
versal belief of this sort is always based 
on a deep and tragic truth. To-day a 
fleeting adulation of riches is abroad in a 



102 TAKE IT FROM ME 

world which has not known how to adjust 
itself to new methods of production. 
Pandering to this bad kind of thought 
newspapers and books proclaim the duty 
of acquiring the superfluous — teachers and 
even parents echo it. Life, seen from a 
slight intellectual elevation, looks like the 
scramble round a grab-bag. But — 

Popular wisdom is not deceived. 

Obscurely but certainly it knows that in- 
dividual wealth is not a good thing, but a 
bad thing. It may not know whether or 
not it is good for the community that the 
Eothschilds should cram their garrets and 
their cellars with fermenting billions. In 
fact, the popular mind does not worry 
much over that side of the problem. It 
knows that such things right themselves; 
it has an old historic memory which tells 
it all such accumulations are mere tem- 
porary things — the dam breaks and the 
waters find their level. It remembers 
wraths and indignations that broke the 
dikes. This part of the wealth problem, 
I repeat, the popular mind leaves to the 
Fabian society and dreamy professors of 
life. Its consolation is in the ineradicable 
popular belief that the rich man — he who 
boasts the superfluous — doesn't have a 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 103 

very good time of it in this world and 
will have a worse time of it in the 
next. This belief is embedded, like a 
triangle in a circle, in the rock-wisdom of 
every race. Go ask a man of the people 
— in any language you and he speak to- 
gether. 

He may not be able to give you a reason, 
but he has an instinctive sort of belief 
that there is in hoarded money a strange 
power to degrade. When it is stored up 
in a pile it rots and spreads infection. This 
common man, of whom, as you are fond 
of saying, God made millions, cannot ex- 
plain the source of his conviction, but he 
is firmly persuaded that money has a 
power to degrade those who deal in it — 
money lent, sold, given, stolen, gained. 
You cannot argue him out of his obscure 
belief that the rich man is his intellectual 
and moral inferior, and that the peril in 
the accumulation of millions is for the mil- 
lionaire — and not for the millions of men 
he is depriving of the necessary in order 
to pile up the superfluous. 

Race-wisdom; what lies — a half-dis- 
cerned truth — beneath it? 

This : Poverty is relative ; it is a theory 
of relations; it groups men; it makes for 



104 TAKE IT FROM ME 

fellowship and common effort and union. 
And the popular mind feels that wealth is 
bad because it isolates and makes for 
separation — sends the rich man to wander 
in a desert of fear as vast as the world. 
It makes for isolation. It separates one 
nan from his fellow men and in this separa- 
tion is the peril — and the penalty. 

The old story of Lazarus and Dives was 
nothing but a parable of this truth. The 
tragedy in it is not the fact that one was 
rich and the other poor — that one sat at 
table and fed himself, while the other lay 
in the road, harried by dogs that fed upon 
his sores. The tragedy lay in their separa- 
tion. And that separation was a mere 
symbol of the rich man's isolation after 
death — when chaos rolled between him and 
his fellows. 

It is rather odd that when you take a 
man of the people and let him become a 
rich man he never loses this inbred, popu- 
lar view of riches. He knows the peril. 
Carnegie, the little Scottish ironmaster, 
was a man of the people. Into his strange 
little brain there came the ambition to 
make the steel trade an Empire over which 
he should reign supreme. He did it and 
when he was tired of the toy he sold it for 



THE OTHER FELLOW IN BUSINESS 105 

nearly five hundred million dollars — most 
of them superfluous. Then dim ancestral 
voices began to whisper to him the wisdom 
of the race. The terror of the superfluous 
fell upon him. And with both hands he 
tried to throw away the superfluous — to 
beat back the money- waves that were flow- 
ing in upon him, waist-high, throat-high, 
up to the mouth and the nostrils and the 
eyes. A tragic story— tragic as that re- 
corded in old books and old plays — and 
told in statistics more puissant than a 
Shakespeare tragedy. 

My dear man in the world, take it from 
me — 

You do not want to take all your work- 
wage in money. 

It is not your duty to be a rich man. 
That is not your duty to yourself, or to 
your wife or to your children. You owe 
your wife no superfluous pearls picked out 
of the shark-haunted waters of Manga- 
Eeva. You owe your sons no festering 
piles of hoarded wealth — on which they 
can stand higher than their fellows, arro- 
gant and apart. 

What you owe them is not isolation, but 
a travel-worn path from your door to the 
door of the Other Fellow, 



106 TAKE IT FROM MB 

It is poor work that can be paid for in 
money. 

Your work, if it be done for that unfail- 
ingly righteous paymaster, the Other Fel- 
low, is worth a higher wage — and he will 
pay. 



VI 

POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 



VI 

POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 

WHEN a man finds himself on a 
round world, spinning in space, 
it is natural he should look up at 
the starry worlds, presumably round, spin- 
ning over his head. Then, you would fancy, 
his chief interest would go out to the little 
figures — their legs hidden in funnels or 
skirts — running busily about his world. 
You would expect him to spend most of his 
life looking at his fellow men — studying 
them with respect and amazement. 

As a matter of fact experts in life will 
tell you that one man rarely looks at an- 
other. 

It is upon this extraordinary truth that 
almost all your detective stories are 
founded. The fantastic criminal passes 
through crowds of men, haunts public 
places, and no one sees him. It is not that 
he has the gift of invisibility. It is that 
other men have not the faculty of seeing. 

109 



110 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Indeed, when organized society, for its own 
protection, has need of men with seeing 
eyes it has to catch them when they are 
young and train them to look at their fel- 
low men. That is your detective. He has 
been trained in the patient business of 
looking at men and things. 

Now and then a man is born with the 
seeing eye — and when that happens human- 
ity builds monuments to him and never 
has done talking about him for a thou- 
sand years. He is the man of genius ; he is 
Dante, who saw and singled out the essen- 
tial thing in the man he looked at — the 
spare loins of Michael Scott, the big mas- 
culine nose of Charles of Anjou, the lion- 
look of Sordello. It is by the power of 
vision in a man that you measure his 
genius. John Boccaccio staring at Dante 
saw his "hair and beard were thick, black 
and crisp and the under lip protruded"; 
had he seen more he had been a greater 
man. 

The average man is purblind. 

If you ask him to describe the man he 
sits at daily meat with — the girl he is in 
love with — he will wrinkle his forehead and 
look dazed. In reality he has never looked 
at them. Once I was to have a word with 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 111 

Prince Herbert Bismarck in a public 
place and I did not know him even by- 
sight. I asked his secretary, who for 
twelve years had sat under his dictation, 
to describe the prince's appearance. It 
was as though I had pulled the floor from 
under his feet. He coughed and stammered 
and finally said the prince was a tall man 
in uniform. As there would be a hun- 
dred tall uniformed men in that public 
place the description lacked significance. 
It was too much like the passports the 
bland, unobservant department clerks at 
Washington fill up for you: 

"Eyes — normal. 

' l Forehead — normal. 

1 ' Mouth — normal. ' ' 

And so on ; it is not the way Dante filled 
up poor old Cavalcante's passport for the 
other world. 

If I had my way there should be a 
Median law enforcing every human being 
to look — stare — gaze at the Other Fellow. 
Such a law would revolutionize the world. 
"Instead of which,' ' as the prelate said, 
"men go about looking at things' ' — a 
dreary occupation and cynical. Once in 
Rome I was taken by Mr. Rapinet MacKen- 
zie to visit the Countess Montessori, who 



112 TAKE IT FROM ME 

had invented a wonderful system of edu- 
cation. Perhaps you know what it is. For 
example, infancy gets its tactile sense edu- 
cated by being taught to play with rough 
and smooth surfaces — a strip of sand- 
paper and a strip of silk. Various-colored 
ribbons instruct the young mind in color 
differences. Square blocks are so mysteri- 
ously different from round balls that the 
infant discovers there is a difference. Of 
course, I am only lightly hinting at this 
good educational method. "What I wanted 
to say to the dark-robed countess was this : 
"Your method is sane and natural, but 
think how gloriously exciting it would be 
should you apply it to people, not to 
things. ' ' 

Then I like to think she asked me to sit 
down and drink a cup of tea — only one 
doesn't drink tea of an afternoon in Rome 
— and explain my dark saying; and I ex- 
plained it something like this: 

You set these little, immature humans to 
rubbing silk because it is smooth and sand- 
paper because it is rough. Think how in- 
calculably better it would be for them to 
acquire a knowledge of smoothness by 
touching a woman's cheek and get their 
idea of roughness from father's chin. 



POLARIZING THE OTHER TELLOW 113 

Think how much better it would be to play 
this educational game with people — not 
with things. Think how wildly exciting it 
would be to the infant mind to see redness 
emerge — not from a tawdry ribbon — but 
from Keginald's hair! And to get blue, 
not from a druggist, but from Lucy- 
Helen's eyes! This were worth while. 
For infancy would have acquired two 
amazing facts — the blueness of blue 
and the livingness of Lucy-Helen's 
eyes. 

These are the things I did not say to 
Madame Montessori in her dim Eoman 
drawing-room, but they lie, I am convinced, 
at the bottom of any rational system of 
education. You cannot take a ripe man 
and teach him to see his fellow men. You 
must begin back in that nursery — where 
Carriere smoked. You must begin in the 
first Montessori school to teach the child 
that hair is red — and alive; that it is a 
red and living part of Eeginald. And 
that child, going through life, will be glori- 
ously aware of the color and shape, the 
smoothness and roughness of men and 
women. He will see that humanity is not 
a crowd; he will see the Other Fellow as 
though he were a statue in a public square 



114 TAKE IT FROM ME 

— the sunlight all round him; he will see 
the color of his eyes ! 

And that is a soul-shaking moment. 

You may look at a man's coat — you may 
look at the bright feathers and rags a 
woman puts on her head — and go your 
way; but when you have really seen the 
Other Fellow you are gripped and shaken 
by a mighty truth. 

This truth : Every man is exactly what 
he looks. 

Hearth-rugs and Wigs 

At first glance you might not think it. 
You are befooled by the cut of his coat and 
the color of his silly necktie, which he 
wears by way of disguise; but behind the 
coat and necktie stands the man — deter- 
minedly himself and looking exactly like 
himself. It is because we have ripened 
and are still purblind, with unschooled, 
un-Montessoried vision, that we cannot 
make him out. It is not his fault alone; 
it is also your fault — ambo in culpa estis. 

It is wrong of little Willie to come crawl- 
ing into your drawing-room, with the 
hearth-rug on his back, growling that he 
is a bear; but it is your fault if you take 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 115 

him to be anything but a grubby little boy 
under a hearth-rug. He is exactly what he 
looks — a grubby, undeniable, desirable 
little boy. 

If you run away shrieking your terror, 
or if you shoot him for a bear, it shows 
your powers of observation were, in youth, 
improperly cultivated. Little boys in 
hearth-rugs are not bears. The only 
sound educational system is that which will 
enable you to distinguish between them. 

All the wisdom man needs to go through 
life with is the ability to distinguish a boy 
from a bear. 

I admit, sadly, that the Other Fellow will 
dress himself up in hearth-rugs. It is a 
way he has. But your wise man, schooled 
in detection, is never fooled by little dis- 
guises of cloth and hair — by the tow wig 
and smoked glasses. 

I once knew the German Kaiser — 

It was years ago, in my student days in 
Germany, I saw him first. And I did not 
see at all the mask you see on his coins 
and in his pictures — the frowning eye- 
brows, the menacing mustache, the impas- 
sive face. He was the young Lohengrin 
then, dressed all in white, a steel helmet 
on his head — as in the opera ; limp and pale, 



116 TAKE IT FROM ME 

the mustache, not yet twisted up into his- 
toric horns, fell about his mouth; and his 
eyes were vague and dreamy. Was that 
the real Kaiser ? You may see him, as the 
day he declared war on the world, riding 
down Unter den Linden in his red auto- 
mobile, a portent of a man, hieratic, with 
sword and feathers and, at his side, the 
poor old Kaiserin dressed from head to 
foot in cloth the color of blood; or you 
may see him, booted and spurred, riding 
haughtily among his Prussian troopers, 
rigid as though he had drunk the poison 
of war. Tow- wig and hearth-rug ! 

For years he experimented with his im- 
perial head ; at one time, as you know, the 
wilted mustache drooped poetically; again 
it bristled all-conquering; he parted his 
hair on the side — in the middle — had it cut 
en brosse. And with startling rapidity he 
would change his clothes — like Fragoli of 
the music halls. His life was like a scene 
in a pantomime. A short, little man with 
a crippled arm — he is five feet six inches 
in height — he had himself reproduced in 
marble as a stalwart six-foot giant. What 
is underneath the parti-colored hearth- 
rug? A mystery! It is only the unknown 
that is mysterious. When you look at the 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 117 

Kaiser you see that he — like every other 
man — is exactly what he looks. And you 
carry away a picture of a strange, sad little 
man, who has had all his life to struggle 
with a crippled body and a menaced brain 
— a weakly strenuous child prancing in a 
hearth-rug. No lion ; no war lord crowned 
with divine right; but a man — with only 
man's divinity. 

What do you love in a man? 

The divinity you share with him. 

That is what pulls you together. 

Is it not? 



The Tent Over America 

You look at a man and then inevitably 
you go toward him. 

It is the rule of life. 

Ajid then, it may be, a queer thing hap- 
pens — 

I wonder if it has ever happened to you. 
The Other Fellow is coming down your 
side of the turnpike. You look at him and 
you go toward him and as you draw near 
sheer horror thrusts you — staggering — 
back from him. Now in this case it wasn't 
the hearth-rug that frightened you and 
drove you back; it was the man. 



118 TAKE IT FROM ME 

And here we are confronted by a darkly 
scientific truth which it is my business in 
this chapter to make clear. The matter 
is one of polarization. I am going to 
give you an illustration and then — if you 
will take it from me — I shall try and define 
this law of polarization which pulls you 
toward the Other Fellow and, now and 
then, drives you back. It will be some 
practical advantage to you in dealing with 
men in tow-wigs and little boys in hearth- 
rugs. 

I wrote nearly a page of print here 
about a man I once shuddered away from; 
it was by way of illustration; but on sec- 
ond thought, which is always best because 
it is less emotional than first thought, I 
tore it up. He was a very prominent man. 
He stood high in the world. It would not 
add to the stability of public decency for 
me to describe the horror that sent me, 
staggering, back from him. Let me take 
the illustration out of a book I read once 
in an idle hour on shipboard. It was a 
novel, "Atlantis," by Gerhart Hauptmann, 
published shortly before the war. I was 
drawn to the book by its pleasant state- 
ment: 

"Were you to spread a tent over 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 119 

America you would have the most beauti- 
ful, the most comfortable penitentiary in 
the world.' ' 

So I read on and I met the hero. He 
was "a high-minded scientist,' ' which is 
the sort of scientist I love. He was also 
"a scion of German nobility," son of a 
general, descendant of a "long line of in- 
tellectual men"; and he visited the United 
States and found it, as you have seen, in- 
habited by a sort of convict population, 
without high-minded scientists or scions 
of nobility or sons of generals — a horrid 
place. Ajid I read on and on and came to 
a scene where this distinguished hero is 
talking to the woman he is in love with — 
a rather nice German actress. She sits, 
quietly enough, eating sweetmeats. At 
one of his remarks she "looks at him with 
a sardonic smile." That is all; she did, 
indeed, look at him with a sardonic smile ; 
it was wrong, I know; one shouldn't look 
at a high-minded scientific scion of Ger- 
man nobility with a sardonic smile — it is 
not being done this season in our set. She 
was wrong, of course, it was bad form; 
but I must let Hauptmann tell you, in his 
own words, the volcanic effect of the poor 
little actress' smile. 



120 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Read here: " Since he was a man and 
knew he was impotent in the face of such 
fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury 
mounted in him, driving the blood into his 
eyes, and causing him involuntarily to 
clench his fists. His full-blooded nature 
occasionally had need of such frenzy. It 
was a phenomenon with which his friends 
were familiar. . . . Had he not succeeded 
in controlling himself he might more have 
resembled a Papuan negro than a Euro- 
pean. He might have turned into a beast 
in human form" — and all this, mark you, 
because the little woman, eating sweet- 
meats, smiled at him sardonically! 

A book is like a man ; and when it shows 
you a face like this you shudder away 
from it. And because every author writes 
the thing he would like to be, you feel for 
the man a little of the antipathy you feel 
for his books. So I determined, if ever I 
had the chance to meet Gerhart Haupt- 
mann I would run away from him. I lived 
at San Remo and his winter home was but 
a few miles away and one day, in spite of 
my reluctance, fate brought us together. 
I looked for the Papuan negro in him — 
I waited to see him clench his fists in a full- 
blooded frenzy. And nothingihappened. I 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 121 

tried him with a sardonic smile. And the 
oldish gentleman in the ill-fitting gray 
clothes and bulbous shoes smiled back at 
me, gently, like a high-minded, scientific 
scion. Then I knew that Gerhart Haupt- 
mann was not one man, but two — not one 
man, but many men; that he was, like the 
cosmos itself, a totality of paired oppo- 
sites. In a way he was like the hero of 
his book. One pole was Papuan and the 
other was high-minded. One pole drew 
me to him as compellingly as the other 
pole drove me back. It was all a question 
of polarization. 

The Truth That Is Like a Tree 

The Other Fellow is a bundle of opposed 
forces — positive and negative. His pride 
falls apart into two kinds of pride. He 
has his good pride and his bad pride. 
Every one of his cardinal virtues has its 
dark pole of opposition. His very vices 
strive to balance themselves against his 
virtues. And his whole life is a struggle 
to maintain an equilibrium — to affirm him- 
self. As your life is, and mine. There is 
sound wisdom in the old phrase " getting 
on the right side of a fellow" and it means 



122 TAKE IT FROM ME 

precisely the right polarization. There is 
no man living, Papuan or scientist, with 
whom you cannot make and maintain this 
sympathetic connection. It is a law. Na- 
poleon, at Saint Helena, said, by way of 
explaining his miraculous career in life: 
"I had the art of drawing from men all 
they could give. ' ' Polarization. 

What I have been trying to make plain 
is a tenable, ultimate truth — a purely 
scientific truth that touches spirit as well 
as matter, man and cosmos alike ; it works 
out just as clearly in daily relations of 
human beings as it does in the urge and 
drive of whirling universes. And here we 
may leave aside the quasi-scientific jargon 
of attraction and repulsion. 

Put it this way: To know a man 
you have to find in him the quality 
you have in common. That is other- 
fellowship. 

This chapter has been written to no pur- 
pose if it has not brought home to you 
the tremendously important fact that the 
first step toward knowing what you have 
in common with the Other Fellow is to look 
at him. 

You have to look at him and get him into 
your consciousness. 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 123 

And you must keep him in your con- 
sciousness. 

This is a strange and weird thing, but 
it is true: If you do not keep the Other 
Fellow in your consciousness — if you are 
not actively aware of him — he becomes 
misty, remote and unreal. This illusive 
and elusive quality, indeed, he shares with 
all things. The more consciousness you 
put into a thing the more real it becomes. 
You remember the man in a preface, who 
became so grotesquely conscious of a book 
he thought it was alive and talking to him. 
If you have a house and garden in the 
Berkshire Hills it will fall out of repair, 
tumble down, disintegrate, go back into 
chaos if you neglect it — that is, if you 
withdraw your consciousness from it. And 
a man is even more elusive than a house. 
It is not enough to look at him until you 
get him into your consciousness, you must 
be so persistently aware of him that you 
keep hira there. 

Looking is the first step ; knowing is the 
second; and when you have got this far 
you find it is impossible to maintain an 
attitude of indifference. You like him or 
you dislike him. And with greater knowl- 
edge comes the discovery that you both 



124 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

like and dislike him; that what you like 
in him is the real man, the norm, and 
what you dislike are those qualities that 
separate him from the normal ideal of 
mankind. 

For there is an ideal, toward which man 
is definitely struggling. 

Heart-broken reformers, like John Hu- 
bert Greusel, confused in a world at war, 
write books to prove that man is merely 
a beast that hungers, loves, hates and 
gloomily prays — that his way through life 
is a "Bogue's March." Eoguish enough 
and dark, stained with mud and blood and 
dishonor, but always he is marching to- 
ward an ideal that shines as it has always 
shone and beckons him. There is a lot of 
cant in the world, as Mr. Greusel says; 
but "brotherhood" is no less true because 
men cant about it — the very fact that men 
pretend to be better than they are, the 
very fact that there are sham goodness, 
sham brotherliness, sham unselfishness is 
the supreme proof that mankind is march- 
ing toward the Great Ideal. 

A "Bogue's March?" We are all 
rogues, if you will have it so, but we are 
marching side by side and we are led by 
a star. The most evil thing on earth is not 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 125 

war but pessimism; it is not physical 
death but the death of your faith in man 
and the cosmic process — that is the abomi- 
nation of desolation. With the loss of 
your faith in the Other Fellow goes the 
loss of your faith in yourself; and you 
stand, a heart-broken reformer, in a cha- 
otic world that has tumbled about you. 

You know there is good in yourself — 
right well you know it. There is good in 
the reformer and right well he knows it 
or he would not break his heart over the 
warring world. 

Do you see? The good is in you and in 
him and in the Other Fellow. 

The good in yourself, as William James 
said in his thundering way, is "conter- 
minous and continuous with a more of the 
same quality" which is operative in the 
universe outside of you ; and — take it from 
me or William James — you can get aboard 
of it and save yourself when all your lower 
being has gone to pieces in the wreck. 

This is the truth that towers up like a 
tree. 



126 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Rich Man, Beggar Man, Thief 

What are you going to do about the 
Other Fellow who has chosen a way of 
wrong-living — by begging or by stealing, 
so-named or not so-named. 

Are you going to look at him, know him, 
hold him in your consciousness and — in 
time of need — get aboard the good that is 
in him? 

Once I sat with Alfred Henry Lewis in 
a dingy cafe on the East Side of New 
York; we were looking at Other Fellows. 
And there came across to our table a sad, 
dark-visaged little man, blown to us from 
some port of crime. Neither Lewis nor 
I had beckoned him. He came of his own 
accord, unknown, unwelcomed, eyed with 
suspicion. He sat down. The three of us 
were silent. Suddenly, yielding to some 
obscure inner compulsion, the little man 
said: "I am a thief — and I want to tell 
you about it." 

And he told us about it. 

He looked upon it as a bad business, 
paying small profit; he was sorry he had 
gone in for it; it was his own fault, for 
his father, owning a small shop on the East 
Side, wished him to be a lawyer; he had 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 127 

just had two years of prison and wanted 
to get into another business; and then he 
looked confidently at Lewis — and the 
strong, wise, old lion-head of him — and 
said: "What do you think I'd better do 
about it!" 

That was a memorable meeting between 
Alfred Henry Lewis and the darkling, 
little thief. What he had seen in Lewis 
I knew; it was the "conterminous and 
continuous" goodness and he got aboard 
it. You and I might have thought him an 
unclean, dull-witted, unpleasant little thief 
of a man, but Lewis with his deeper vision 
saw an immense and immortal tragedy. 
He saw in the dingy little Jewish thief 
the eternal tragedy of man. What he saw 
was the Other Fellow, vanquished in a 
struggle with the powers of moral dark- 
ness — caught up in the net of monstrous 
crimes and monstrous illusions; van- 
quished and caught up, but still struggling. 
If you knew Alfred Henry Lewis you 
know his answer ; he said to the little thief : 
"Get aboard!" 

' ' To understand, ' ' said the French poet, 
"is to forgive." 

An understanding of this East Side 
criminal made it impossible to stand aside 



128 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

and let him "roll darkling down the tor- 
rent of his fate." And Lewis, more than 
any one I ever loved, had the deep faculty 
of being able to think of the wicked man 
as the wicked man thought of himself. 
Wickedness seen from the outside is al- 
ways unreasonable and preposterous. But 
the criminal does not see his crime from 
the outside. I have known many such 
men — murderers and the like; and when- 
ever I found one who could not justify his 
crime to himself, that man, I found, wanted 
to die. Without self -justification of some 
sort life for the criminal man is im- 
possible. He must get out of crime or 
get out of life. The thief lays his theft 
to the evils of organized society; the mur- 
derer lays his crime to the wrong done 
him by the other; not even the basest 
man, if he be sane, can stand up under the 
weight of an unjustified crime — he must 
justify it to himself. He must cheat him- 
self before he can cheat another. 

Out little thief in the cafe was as un- 
aware of sin as an animal. There had 
dawned upon him no higher knowledge 
than that his way of life, which was a way 
of thieving, did not pay. Vaguely, there 
stirred in him a desire to get aboard the 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 129 

conterminous goodness of humanity. To 
understand him you had to see that his 
criminal life was based in ignorance — the 
stupid self -justification that ' i society owed 
him a living"; and to help him — well, 
you had to be Alfred Henry Lewis. You 
had to know how to meet the wistful, un- 
teachable pride of ignorance. You had to 
know how to see the Other Fellow's wick- 
edness as he sees it — as reasonable and 
not preposterous. And, above all, you had 
to know how to take him aboard and make 
room for him. 

Beggars and thieves — the wrong-livers 
among the Other Fellows — are much the 
same. Their trouble is identical. They 
are living against the law of evolution and 
not with it. They are working, each in 
his bad little fashion, for separateness. 
The huge, grotesque millionaire gathering 
wealth with both hands, the shabby thief 
filching eggs, the wastrel of drink and in- 
dulgence begging at the street corner, are 
one and the same; they are neither better 
nor worse; they are identical. They suf- 
fer from themselves. The evil they do is 
a common evil. 

Time and again the world has meted out 
harsh punishment to them. It has hanged 



130 TAKE IT FKOM ME 

its millionaires to lamp-posts. It has 
burned its thieves at the stake. It has 
whipped its beggars to death. 

Do you know what it was trying to do 
in this poor, crude way? 

It was trying to force them to attach 
themselves to the community. It was try- 
ing to compel them to get aboard the con- 
terminous good. And force failed, as it 
always fails. 

You cannot exercise a vengeful power 
over the Other Fellow, even for his own 
good. Love is the only foundation of per- 
manent power. There is only one way of 
conquering the wrong-liver, be he thief or 
beggar: It is to look at him, know him, 
hold him in your consciousness, under- 
stand and — what is the use of many words 1 
— take him aboard. 

Society in all its attempts at organiza- 
tion has only been trying to do one thing. 
It has been trying to get rid of the wasters 
at the top and at the bottom. It has been 
trying to normalize those abnormal fel- 
lows, who are called in the nursery-rhyme : 
Eich man, Beggar man, Thief. And with 
all the social good- will imaginable it has — 
the Marching Eogues confess it — done but 
little. To-day as always the Eich Man, 



POLARIZING THE OTHER FELLOW 131 

Beggar Man, Thief come aboard one by 
one, at the voice of invitation of some 
Other Fellow, kindly as wise, who gives 
them, one by one, a hand up the gangway. 
In spite of the stagnant pessimists the 
world is getting better, bnt it is getting 
better through individual effort. 

It is when one man meets another, sees 
him as he is, knows him, "beneath the eye- 
lids of man" look forth new heavens and 
a new earth. 

And only then. 



VII 

THE OTHEE FELLOW AND THE 
BALLOT 



VII 

THE OTHER FELLOW AND THE 
BALLOT 

THE world of thought is divided into 
two camps — with certain negligible 
bands of outlaws, cavorting, with 
airy unrestraint, in the outskirts. 

These two camps, like the poles of the 
magnet, are always in opposition. No 
matter what peaceful question you put to 
them they fall into their fighting lines and 
take up arms. All philosophy is merely a 
rather pathetic attempt to reconcile two 
opposite poles. To any question of im- 
portance there are always two answers. 

What matters most — what is the mea- 
sure of civilization — the welfare of the in- 
dividual or the race-future f 

Are you to judge a civilization by the 
liberty, equality, fraternity it gives the in- 
dividual or by its fore-sighted care of the : 

Endless stream of babies? 

Present or future? 

135 



136 TAKE IT FKOM MB 

John Smith or the mysterious, perma- 
nent Smithdom of which he is a fleeting 
part? 

The man or the race? 

When yon pnt questions of this sort you 
get two answers — always two ; for I do not 
heed the airy, unrestrained outcries of the 
outlaws, herding the mavericks of thought. 

Indubitably, you belong to one camp or 
the other. You are conservative or radical. 
You are for the Haves or the Wants. You 
are for those who want to "make the 
best of things," even though those things 
be obsolete, untidy, decrepit, or you want 
to "make an end of things' ' and get a new 
beginning for better, unknown things. 
Whichever your way of thinking is, there 
is a lot to be said for it. And I might 
add very quietly that a lot is said for it. 
That is what keeps your politician busy. 
His appeal is always to one of these poles 
of thought or to the other. And when you, 
in your victorious manhood, throw up your 
hat and cheer him, you are in reality, cheer- 
ing the camp of settled conviction to which 
you belong. 

A truism? 

It is, if you insist upon calling it by that 
rather ill-natured word, a truism. 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 137 

What lias come out of the shock and 
friction of these two intellectual camps is 
man's way of living in his fluctuant world. 
Out of them he has got the sum-total of 
a tolerably reasonable life. Now, I do not 
for one moment imagine that I can tempt 
you out of your camp. And that is the 
last thing I want to do. Your usefulness 
as a civic unit lies wholly in the fact that 
you have a mind of your own — that you 
know where you stand — that you know 
your flag. You can be reckoned with. 

What would you do in the other camp? 
Not much good, I fancy. You would stare 
with blinking incompetence at the un- 
familiar weapons and meaningless her- 
aldry. 

Possibly you may think I am rather 
prodigal, in this book, of formidable truths, 
but nevertheless, this one is so important 
it must get itself stated : 

The man who gives himself to a cause 
always gives himself to the right cause. 

Luther, God help him, could do no other ; 
whether a man were Caesar or Edward 
IV, he could do no other ; and if you have 
joined a camp — chosen a flag — then surely 
the cause you are fighting for is the right 
cause, because it is your cause. 



138 TAKE IT FKOM ME 

Are you fighting for man's welfare, pres- 
ent and peculiar to him? That is well. 
Are you busy with the " unending stream 
of babies" ! That is well. It is because 
there are two forces — and not one — that 
humanity drives toward its goal. There is 
a fine, ultimate sense in which the two poles 
are one. 

Look at the Other Fellow. 

He has a political party. It is not your 
party. He has a leader, who stands, like 
a peacock on a terrace wall, squalling in 
conscious beauty. But the point is that 
the Other Fellow's leader is squalling noble 
words, noble sentiments, undeniable things. 
In the fine, ultimate sense, whereof I spoke, 
his ideal is one with your ideal. 

Two things stick out of present day 
politics, as the two horns stick, amazingly, 
out of a bull's head. They are rooted in 
political thought, as a bull's horns are 
rooted in his skull. And these two ideals 
are brotherliness and service. 

There is not the obscurest politican — 
not the candidate for hog- warden in your 
parish — who does not proclaim himself an 
aspirant for brotherhood and service. 
That is the rock of his platform, no mat- 
ter what he thinks of minor issues — hog 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 139 

cholera in the parish or the repair of the 
village pump. I touched this thought be- 
fore in passing through an earlier chapter 
of this book. The more I deal with it the 
more significant it seems. What's wrong 
with the world, when even the merest 
politician dare not confront an audience 
without at least pretending that he is an 
aspirant for brotherliness and service! 
Even self-rated men, deserters from the 
common duty, and the common weal, make 
a pretense of it. They are the Pyms and 
Pistols of the army — prowlers and pickers- 
up — but they know which way the army 
is going. They are, if you will, mere pre- 
tenders, hypocrites, comedians, but they 
know — just as well as saint and prophet — 
that mankind has chosen a path to walk in 
and that it is a path of love and sacrifice. 

Do you imagine any squirrel-souled poli- 
tician would prate to you of these high 
things unless he knew they were embedded 
in your moral consciousness and mine? 

That man we were talking about — the 
candidate for hog- warden in your village — 
would not dare to ask for your vote by ap- 
pealing to your greed and your selfishness. 
He knows you would go back from him on 
polling days as though he were a polecat. 



140 TAKE IT FEOM ME 

I say this is the day of Great Ideals — 
service, brotherliness, mutuality, sacrifice, 
love, unity. Science, working with the 
scalpel and the microscope, is realizing the 
oneness of life ; and men are learning it in 
the vaster, bloodier laboratories of life and 
death. 

The Fellow in the other camp is not 
separated from you. He salutes the same 
ideal. And you and he, in the long battle 
for man's liberation, are marching, though 
in different divisions, toward the same con- 
quest. 

"Of Whom God Made Millions: 9 

It is easy to sneer at those of us who 
believe man is going somewhere, even 
though his road is not a straight line be- 
tween two points, but is indeed a convolute 
and puzzling road, turning back upon it- 
self, full of loops and spirals. It is easy to 
sneer at the ' i Idealist, ' ' the ' i Perf ection- 
ist" ; but he, after all, is merely the plain 
man who sees that evolution, even on the 
physical plane, is not merely running round 
in a circle. 

At the worst his idealism is no more than 
a refusal to believe that humanity is en- 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 141 

gaged exclusively in the dog-like diversion 
of chasing its own tail. It is going along 
a road; it is going somewhither. And the 
most notable milestone whereby you can 
measure his advance, is the welfare of the 
common man. 

There are, then, uncommon men? 

A few. 

Eoughly speaking there are, at what 
you might call the top of the scale, about 
ten per cent of uncommon men uncom- 
monly endowed with wit, acquisitiveness, 
power; and at the bottom is another ten 
per cent, uncommonly deficient in these 
very qualities. Between them is the vast 
eighty per cent of average, normal man- 
kind to which you and I belong. We have 
no exalted genius and we have not sunk 
into wastrelism. We are men of the mid- 
way. And in a world intent upon civic 
development it is we who have gained and 
who are gaining. More and more we are 
acquiring our rights and establishing the 
kind of civic order we need for our devel- 
opments. That is why I refuse to look 
upon democracy as an " experiment, ' ' un- 
less you add the vital statement that life 
itself is an experiment. No, you and I and 
the Other Fellow have justified popular 



142 TAKE IT FROM ME 

government — the government of the eighty 
per cent — wherever we have succeeded in 
establishing it in spite of the fat, hier- 
archal ten per cent sitting on our heads 
and the squashed and muddled ten per 
cent that keeps getting under our feet. 
Popular government breaks down only 
when it ceases to be popular government — 
when some genius of craft and selfishness 
reaches down from above and strangles it 
or some poor, muddy fool struggles up 
from below and befouls it. 

And your duty and mine — take it from 
me — is immense and imperative : Vote ! 

I do not care which party in a democracy 
you vote for — which one of the common 
flags you fly. You have had warnings 
enough about the danger of party spirit. 

It is not in party spirit that the peril 
lies, but in the voter *s indolence and self- 
interest. 

The party is merely that camp to which 
— by a certain urge of mentality — you 
rightly belong. Speaker Eeed of Maine 
used to say to the voters of his district: 
"See which crowd has the honester men 
and vote with it." Then with his fat, 
whimsical smile he would add: "That is, 
of course, my crowd.' ' He was right, for 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 143 

it is paradoxically true that both crowds 
have the honester men. The main thing is 
to vote for them. 

A small thing, that ballot — a mere scrap 
of paper! 

It is democracy's only weapon and the 
whole history of mankind may be read in 
the story of how that weapon was fash- 
ioned. It is a poor enough weapon, you 
say; poor enough in its way; but it has 
won for the men of the midway all the 
political justice they have gained. Nature 
brings you into the world precisely as it 
brings in the Other Fellow, and leaves you 
and him to do the best you can for your- 
selves — subject to your lot. Then comes 
the second birth. The grant of a vote is 
your birth as a citizen. If it is your lot 
to be born, civicly, in a representative 
democracy, your right to vote is a toga. 

What is one vote in a million, or in thirty 
millions, worth? 

It is worth precisely what you, who drop 
it in the box, are worth. 

Intellect, education, personal influence — 
indeed all personal qualities — have their 
full individual weight in determining po- 
litical decisions. As a voter you count for 
one and only one. That is true, but as a 



144 TAKE IT FROM ME 

force in the state, you count for all that 
your will, your energies, your capacities 
enable you to compass. 

Therefore it is that the greatest of civic 
crimes is civic indolence. 

The man who may vote and does not 
vote is a traitor. The woman who can 
vote and does not vote is a renegade. They 
are traitor and renegade to themselves and 
to the community. A duty shared with 
others is not less of a duty but more. 

Napoleon, aiming at that sort of justi- 
fication which is the mastering need of 
exceptional men, said: "Nobody is re- 
sponsible for collective crimes.' ' No 
falser word was ever spoken. You are re- 
sponsible for collective crimes ; you and I. 

There is something strange and terrify- 
ing in this responsibility that knits man 
to man and enmeshes him in humanity. 

The Priest and the Bandit 

One day I went to see a man guillotined. 
It was in Paris, in the Place de la Rou- 
quette. There was a gray, bleared, wintry 
dawn and in that dawn a man came out 
to die. 

The executioners had shackled his hands. 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 145 

They had cut away the shirt from his neck 
and breast and I could see the gasping 
throat of the man and his heaving heart. 
It was as though the pulse of humanity 
were throbbing there — wildly. The execu- 
tioners drove him on. In front of him 
and walking backward went a priest of his 
religion, holding aloft before the eyes 
that were to die a crucifix of ivory and 
ebony. And the executioners dropped 
on their knees and roped together the 
man's legs and threw him face down on 
the wet stones of the public square. The 
man was a bandit and murderer. They 
thrust him forward, driving his head 
through the lunette of the guillotine, and 
the knife fell and sheared it away. And 
the head rolled, with open mouth and star- 
ing eyes, into the sawdust. 

As I stood there, shaken with the horror 
of man's justice upon man, some one — 
more shaken with the horror of it — steadied 
himself with a hand on my shoulder. It 
was the priest, who had held aloft the 
symbol for the eyes that were to die. He 
was, I think, a minor parish priest, of 
small account in a hierarchal world. 
"Calm yourself," I said, "du calme!" 
He looked up at me with eyes that had 



146 TAKE IT FROM ME 

seen a great truth and what he said has 
haunted me ever since. 

"More than one head fell into that 
basket of blood and sawdust,' ' he said, 
"more than one head." 
i I did not call him mad; I waited. 

"His head and mine — for he and I were 
one," he said softly, "and your head, too, 
for we are all one." 

He went away into the bleared dawn, a 
little, dingy man in the bleak uniform of 
his creed ; but, he left with me his message 
— the word of indissoluble, inseparable, un- 
changeable oneness of man. 

The Bark Intelligence 

"No man is responsible for collective 
crime"? 

You are responsible for it 

And for every failure in democracy — 
the experiment of democracy if you will — 
you are responsible, if you have not pro- 
claimed your will. Your ballot was not 
a mere scrap of paper ; it would have gone 
freighted with your intellect, energy, edu- 
cation, influence, will. You are a wise 
man and good, are you? Then the greater 
your civic crime in failing to record 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 147 

yourself. When you vote, your personal 
worth goes into the ballot box with the 
scrap of paper you have marked your 
will on. 

To-day the ideal of political justice de- 
mands universal suffrage, and without you 
— by just so much as you are worth — 
it is imperfect. 

What you owe the state no one else can 
give. 

And if democratic government indeed 
fails, it is because you — and not the Other 
Fellow — have failed to meet its demand 
for active and intelligent virtue. It is upon 
your good sense, sound judgment, honest 
purpose, high devotion to the Public Thing 
that the whole tall structure of Free Gov- 
ernment rests. 

The chief danger to democracy is in the 
indolence of the citizens. 

This is the fact that so strongly im- 
pressed itself upon that wise, calm student 
of American democracy, James Bryce. He 
saw twenty thousand citizens gathered in 
a bowl to howl gleefully at athletes kicking 
a leathern ball about, when as many hun- 
dreds could not be tempted to the voting 
booths. And being a man of classical at- 
tainments he recalled that Athens perished 



148 TAKE IT FROM ME 

only when her citizens ceased to vote. 
Athenian orators talked in vain. And in 
vain the magistrates sent round the 
Scythian bowmen, the police of the day, to 
scour the streets with vermilion-stained 
ropes and drag the indolent voters to the 
polling place. The citizens preferred to 
watch the athletes, or lounge in the sun, 
or mind what they called their own busi- 
ness — as though a citizen's own business 
were not that of ruling the state. 

I believe, as James Bryce believed, that 
your indolence is the " American peril," 
but behind it one can make out the shadow 
of another menace. It is that curious 
self-interest which leads a man to set up 
his own little pet advantage in place of 
the common good which is the aim of free 
government. You have on the one hand 
the man who uses his political will for 
personal money gains; and over against 
him stands the vehement proletarian who 
preaches "class-consciousness" — that hid- 
eous doctrine of separateness and hate. 

These are the dark intelligences, fight- 
ing blindly against the common good. 

There is no need of getting senti- 
mental and slopping over about the Other 
Fellow, but the basis of democratic gov- 



OTHER FELLOW AND THE BALLOT 149 

eminent is the plain law that, in reality, 
it is only what is good for the Other Fel- 
low that is good for you. It is in ascer- 
taining what is good for the Other Fellow 
that the whole art of politics consists. A 
difficult art, hedged with perplexities and 
problems ? 

Unquestionably. But there is one rule, 
age-old and unfailing, which will take you 
far : It is this : 

What is not good for the hive is not 
good for the bee. 

What is not good for the Other Fellow 
is not good for you. This mind-wisdom 
has like every coin — you already know — 
two sides to it. But taken broadly it is 
the fair, strong rule of free government. 

Then your duty. 

In a democracy it is plain; first of 
all, go to the voting stall without wait- 
ing to be driven by Scythian bowmen 
or dragged by vermilion-tinted ropes ; and 
vote! 

To affirm what ought to be — to will what 
ought to be — to vote for what ought to 
be is surely to create it. By your very 
affirmation, on your very will, by your 
very vote you bring it out of the increate 
into the actual. That is the way the world 



150 TAKE IT FROM ME 

gets on — the ideal going ahead and tug- 
ging the real after it. 

Your duty — duplicate and imperative — 
is to vote and to vote for the Other Fellow. 



vni 

THE FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 



VIII 
THE FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 

THE deepest and darkest fact in all 
history is race. 

Of course race-prejudice admit- 
tedly abounds. From the viewpoint of 
the astronomer, who sees this ridiculously 
small planet in space, swarmed over by 
tiny human animalculae — at proud odds 
with each other — it is more than absurd. 
It has about as much dignity as the haughty 
attitude of the red ants toward the white 
ants. Yet you have to reckon with it and 
I have to reckon with it. Indeed it looks 
as though the abolition of this deep and 
dirty prejudice would be man's last self- 
conquest. It clings and haunts. In it you 
hear ancestral voices of warning, of anger, 
of fear: "The dark Semite passes — he is 
Zohak — beware !" In the suavest, most 
cultured man there rise unexpectedly, like 
phantoms, the terror of the oblique eye, 
the horror of the black skin. 
153 



154 TAKE IT FROM ME 

If you go to your biologist with your 
tale of race-prejudice he will grin at you 
as the astronomer grins at the ant-antip- 
athies of red and white. He knows that 
all mankind is all the same thing — that the 
physiological variant is so slight it 
amounts to little more than one per cent 
between the belle of your ballroom and 
the squaw of the Painted Desert. And the 
philosopher will tell you that all the diver- 
gencies of manners and morals and cus- 
toms and costumes are mere slight marks 
enabling us to distinguish one friend from 
another. 

All of which is good science and sound 
common sense. It is easy enough to get 
it into one's brain. The difficulty is to get 
it into one's blood. Intellectually you and 
I scorn race-prejudice as we scorn the les- 
ser forms of selfishness and arrogance, but 
intellectual scorn does not free us from 
it. It is in the blood. 

The Red Car 

When I had written that word of terror 
and mystery I laid my pen down. It 
seemed as though I had touched, with wild 
irrelevancy, the flame and edge of this 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 155 

world's war. And then slowly I began to 
realize that for the men of our generation 
there is no thought — there is no problem 
— which has not its root in the war. 
Whether you will or whether you will not, 
the war is the one great fact that shadows 
— as with whirling wings — our tragic 
century. 

Our understanding of it is the measure 
of our understanding of each other — and 
of ourselves; and for ages to come life 
must be lived by its lessons. 

History is not a steady progression. It 
is full of gaps and chasms. And a huge 
abyss separates the present from the days 
before the war. 

I do not say the Great War has made 
a new world — that new world has been al- 
ways in the making ; but it has severed us 
from the ante-bellum days, as widely as 
though a century of time had been thrust 
in between. You cannot think of life with 
suave optimism and peace-lapped imagina- 
tion, as you thought of it in those far-off 
and fabulous days. 

Something larger and nakeder has 
emerged. 

Did you see in the war merely a tragic 
waste of human stuff — in a world muddled 



156 TAKE IT FROM ME 

and ill-managed? Did you see merely 
blind masses of men, who, at a given signal, 
hurled themselves upon each other and 
knew not why ? 

That were to see life as a thing of chaos 
and drunkenness. 

The truth is more significant. 

There are certain events that hold all 
the future even as they contain all the past. 
Such an event was the war. It bore a 
prehistoric significance, and, as well, it 
proclaimed the future. Moreover it was, 
in the fullest sense of the words, the Other 
Fellow's war. Let us see if we cannot get 
at that truth. 

There has been a lot of rubbish written 
and spoken about German militarism. I 
have written some of it and you have 
spoken some of it; between us we have 
done more than our share. Beyond a 
doubt Germany for many years showed a 
nervous dread of loving her neighbors ; but 
it was not this nervous dread alone that 
led her into a monarchic, military form of 
life — and you who have dwelt in Germany 
know that nothing more resolute, consum- 
mate and determinate in form can be 
imagined. You looked with awe at the 
mighty world-power, so high it towered. 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 157 

You may even have envied that Other Fel- 
low, who was German, for the civic fortress 
he had built. Seen from a distance it was 
enormous and picturesque. It was only 
when you looked more closely that you 
saw it was based upon political immatur- 
ity of the German people — upon these two 
bad things, the truculence of the over 
classes and the apathy of the under classes. 
What was above was the Prussian hard- 
ness — the instinct to control and forbid; 
and below there was the tranquillity of 
methodized oppression. The governmental 
form was amazingly efficient, but it was an 
obsolete and archaic form. It was hope- 
lessly out of the line of social evolution. 

You ask why? 

The under classes, you say, in spite of 
their apathy, were perhaps as happy as 
any in the world. If they were kept 
for spit-turning, hunting, house-guarding, 
fighting, they were richly repaid in food, 
shelter, security, kindly care. 

Why was it the mighty empire stood like 
a wall in the way of human evolution ? 

You will get your answer if you glance 
back at the ante-bellum dream of a slowly 
broadening brotherliness which was to give 
every human being his share of the life- 



158 TAKE IT FROM ME 

stuff out of which all capacity for happi- 
ness, and all worth of character, is made. 
One thing alone seemed to stand in the 
way of its fulfillment; and that thing, to 
the thinking mind, was the Prussian mon- 
archy — determinate, resolute, consummate. 
Why? Your second answer, I think, is in 
that symbolic picture of the Kaiserin — the 
good mother, the poor old grandmother — 
being trundled through the streets of 
Berlin, seated in a crimson car and clothed, 
from head to foot, with garments the color 
of blood. 

Deeper than militarism, deeper than com- 
mercial greeds and national ambitions, lay 
the source of the war. Its beginning, as 
its end, was in blood. 

The Peril of Unmixed Blood 

This book is about men; and men are, 
at this stage of their evolution, the pro- 
jection — the adumbration, as it were — 
of races. Now behind a race there is only 
one thing: Blood. It is a strange and a 
mystic fluid, holding in it more than life — 
preserving the ancient hatreds of race for 
race, binding together in a hot and savage 
sympathy the people of one tribe. 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 159 

I have a friend of mine in mind. He 
was an American. Father, grandfather, 
great-grandfather — and further back — had 
been born on a farm in the state of New 
York. For six generations at least none 
of his family had seen Germany; for six 
generations his blood had been separated 
from its Fatherland — he could not speak 
the language or sing the songs. He was 
to the outward eye an American, dipped 
deep in Anglo-Saxon civilization, satu- 
rated, you would think, with democratic 
ideals and habits of life. Came the war. 
The far-off Kaiser went to war. And my 
friend was no longer himself. I hardly 
knew him when we met. Tears flooded his 
eyes ; his hands trembled as he gesticulated 
with them; color flamed in his congested 
face. 

What was the matter with the dear 
man? 

What was it made his heart beat in fierce 
kinship with the remote Prussian war- 
lord? 

Why did he begin to hate the very de- 
mocracy of which he was a part, because 
it failed to share his hot, atavistic love for 
the warring tribe? 

That was the call of the blood. 



160 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Deeper than his Anglo-Saxon civiliza- 
tion, deeper than the impress of American 
aspiration, literature, song, civic freedom, 
deeper than all, lay his blood- sympathy for 
his tribe over sea. Blood called to blood, 
as lion calls to lion in the desert. 

Now it is an exact fact that not the 
purity of blood, but race-mixture, is the 
road of man's progress. It is in the clash 
of mixed bloods that modern man was born. 
In other words, civilization may be ex- 
pressed in terms of racial mixture. If you 
follow the long march of civilization down 
the ages you will see it has been nothing 
but a turmoil of blood mixed and fermented 
with alien blood. 

What a ferment of blood went to the 
making of France you know ; she is Greek, 
Goth, Latin, Gallic, Norman, Celt. 

And you may think of England in the 
same way. Saxon, Norman, Celt, Gael, 
Dane, Pict, Eoman went into the melting- 
pot to make that strong, fine race. 

Again Eussia; forty races are being 
transmuted there into one humanity — fused 
into the grave and sweet democracy of 
that endless land. Out of Eed Eussians 
and White, Poles and Tartars and Cal- 
mucks,. Armenians, Jews, Circassians,. 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 161 

Georgians, Letts and Esthonians there is 
being made — Man. 

In fact civilization knows only one way 
of getting on ; and that is by marrying the 
Other Fellow—or the Other Girl. 

Now the peril, and the boast, of Germany 
was her racial purity; it was the peril of 
the unmixed blood. That is where the war- 
lust rises — it is a tribal thing. 

No man, no sane man, hates with his 
brain. 

Hate is emotional. 

And it is possible for a nation high in 
intelligence, a nation that has advanced 
far up the spiral road of evolution, to 
throw itself back into that tribal mood 
where not reason speaks, but the blood. 
That is the grimmest lesson of the war. 
A great nation placed itself precisely in 
the position of some little sept of primi- 
tive men, who hated all that was not "of 
the blood." It was sure that what was in 
the tribe was best. It made itself a stand- 
ard whereby to measure itself. 

"While the war-lords put this hideous doc- 
trine into bullets, the professors of philo- 
sophy put it into words. You have read 
them often enough. You have heard them 
often enough for they have been shouted 



162 TAKE IT FROM ME 

at the four corners of life. Take them, 
once more, not from me, but from Dr. 
Adolf Lassen, Professor of Philosophy in 
the University of Berlin — 

"Foreigner means enemy.' ' 

These war-breeding, hate-inspired words 
are the most infamous words recorded in 
history. And there they stand — like black 
and monstrous idols of a dead civiliza- 
tion. 

"Foreigner means enemy.' ' 

"No man can remain neutral to the Ger- 
man state and people. Either you must 
consider it the most perfect creation his- 
tory has produced up to now, or you must 
acquiesce in its destruction. We are 
morally and intellectually superior, beyond 
all comparison' ' — 

For a moment Professor Lassen pauses ; 
then he goes on: 

"Thank God! the Dutch are not our 
friends. We Germans have no friends, be- 
cause we are efficiently and morally supe- 
rior to all." 

Of course this is not the voice of a pro- 
fessor of philosophy of the twentieth 
century; it is the unreasoned cry of the 
man-animal dancing round his war-fire. 
No brain spoke there. The blood with its 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 163 

primitive passions had risen and sub- 
merged the brain of the later and more 
highly developed man. What you hear is 
the clamor of the cave man or swamp- 
dweller : 

"I am better than you! My flint is 
sharper! My hut is stronger and higher! 
you are my enemy — all men, all tribes are 
my enemies! Foreigner means enemy!" 

Here then — and in trade-greed or craft 
of rulers — lay the real cause of the war, 
its fount and origin. It was in the un- 
mixed blood — in the old tribal separate- 
ness — in the blood-delusion of tribal supe- 
riority. Of course Germany was not 
without friends. But clearly enough the 
nations were the enemies of tribal and ob- 
solete separateness and of that militarism 
which is at once its weapon and — as Dr. 
Lassen said — its epitome. In fact, if you 
look back at the wars of history you will 
see that men have never fought for any- 
thing on earth except to pull down tribal 
barriers. 

Just so long as there is one nation — 
even one — obsessed with the monstrous 
tribal delusion that "Foreigner means 
enemy" just so long will there be war in 
the world. 



164 TAKE IT FROM ME 

More than that: 

It is not enough to tolerate the Fellow 
of the other race. It is not enough to ad- 
mit his equality. You have got to take 
him into your house. 

The only nations with a future are the 
melting-pot nations. 

Eussia is the future, because she is fus- 
ing forty races into her democracy. Eng- 
land is the future because she is pouring 
her splendid liberties into the Orient and 
the Antipodes. And America is the future 
because she is melting into her brother- 
hood the septs and clans and hatreds and 
divisions of half the wide world. 

Here is the great truth: 

You can save your own race only by 
taking into your house the fellows of the 
Other Eace. 

The Meeting of the Tribes 

It is an odd thing to see how the old 
tribal instinct sticks its head up even in a 
splendidly mixed nation like the United 
States. Humanity has a trick of "throw- 
ing back." 

You will find many a little village in 
New England that thinks it is "morally 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 165 

superior" to other little villages, which 
are exactly like it, even to the chestnut 
tree by the smithy and the wooden pump 
in the school-yard. Once in the Mojave 
desert I came upon a parched and dirty 
hamlet of twenty houses — wooden shacks 
grouped round a "Blue Bird Saloon"; and 
a vehement old man staggered from the 
bar to warn me against a hamlet — eighty 
miles away — which was precisely the same, 
save that its saloon was called "All In," 
instead of the "Blue Bird." 

And you and I are like these little abid- 
ing places of the desert or "Down East." 
We have the same prejudice. We carry it 
out to the absurd theory that because our 
clan was Scottish we are, therefore, better 
than the little, dark fellow next door whose 
tribe was Judah. 

Individually, that dark little man may 
be better than you are, or you may be bet- 
ter than he is. That is all one. What is 
important is that he has certain racial 
qualities which you have not, and his race 
and his race-qualities, quite as much as 
yours, are necessary to the Man who is 
being made in the melting-pot. 

Humanity, as you are fond of saying, is 
in the making. And to the making your 



166 TAKE IT FROM ME 

race-element is as necessary as that of the 
Other Fellow — and no more. One and all 
must go into the pot. 

Historically, you have seen this process 
at work in all the great nations. You know 
how it was done in France and England. 
You may see it at present working yeastily 
in mighty Eussia. Nowhere can you see 
it better than in your own city of New 
York and, for choice, step into Tammany 
Hall. 

Enough obloquy has been poured upon 
that unhappy institution. It has become 
the symbol of all that is bad in civic poli- 
tics. I would not, for the world, lay a 
whitewash brush to it. But if, forgetting 
politics, you go into Tammany Hall you will 
see there one splendid thing it has done — 
it has mixed and fused the races that make 
up New York City. And it has been done 
in a brotherly way of give and take. With 
admiration and approval I used to watch 
these " district leaders" at a powwow. 
Irish and Jew, Hungarian and Yankee, 
German and Italian — men of thirteen 
races — they used to get together and take 
lessons from each other, even in such slight 
matters as that of neckties and clothes. I 
have seen an Italian "leader" shed his 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 167 

splendor as of a bird of Paradise, and 
approximate the dress-sobriety of his 
Yankee fellow. I have seen race-manners 
meet and mingle into something better 
than the manners of any one race. I have 
seen a Jew " leader' ' learn profnse gen- 
erosity from an Irish " leader' ' and the 
Irishman acquire much-needed habits of 
thrift from the Jew. I have seen a rough- 
mannered German "leader" take on Ital- 
ian courtesy and consideration from his 
neighbors and the Italian "leader" assert 
a new kind of frankness. 

There at Tammany Hall, as in a glass 
retort held up to the light by capable 
clinical hands, you may see the race-quali- 
ties of your city being fused into the 
sweeter, more tolerant humanity which is 
to be the ripe product of our democracy. 

That is the best thing in Tammany — 
perhaps it is the one good thing; I do not 
know. Anyway it is something, it is much, 
that it has obliterated within its own ranks 
race-hatred and race-prejudice, which are 
the two most evil things on earth. Not 
the rowdiest "ward-heeler" of Tammany 
would echo the base cry of the Ger- 
man professor of Philosophy : ' ' Foreigner 
means enemy." It is at least to the credit 



168 TAKE IT FROM ME 

of Tammany that it has proclaimed and 
enforced race-tolerance and blood-brother- 
hood — which should be accounted to it for 
righteousness. 

Marrying the Other Fellow 

And I like to call to mind that grim old 
chieftain of Tammany, who first made 
race-unity a law of the order. That was 
Eichard Croker. You may have thought 
of him, in the past, as an ogre of politics. 
Perhaps he was an ogre, as you and I and 
the other immature politicians used to call 
him. But — take it from me — behind his 
turbulent life there lay a royal purpose. 
Perhaps he was unconscious of it. I think 
he was. I do not think he ever realized 
what he was brought into New York for — 
set on high — made a grim ruler of men and 
civic destinies. In fact it was a peculiar- 
ity of Eichard Croker that he could not 
think abstractly — he could not think about 
thought. He was a big, elemental man, 
who could do crude big things. 

But I know — and you may know — why 
destiny picked him out of an obscure Irish 
home and flung him over sea to rule New 
York. It was that he might do his harsh, 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 169 

rough work of beating down the race- 
hatreds that swarmed and screeched in the 
streets of the great city. That was his 
real work. He leavened Tammany with 
tolerance. He enlarged the big round 
table of brotherliness and set places for 
Hun and Hike and Jew and Dago and all 
the despised and nicknamed brothers he 
found outside the door. 

And then ; when he was old and his work 
was done — when he was gray of hair and 
sated of ambition — came the crown of his 
life. It was like something in a storybook. 

What should crown the end of his life? 

Here was a man, forceful and elemental, 
who had tramped and splashed in the mud- 
diest politics. He had been ruthless as a 
war-lord. He had been grasping as a 
usurer. He had done many evil things. 
One good thing he had done — savagely he 
had used his great power to destroy race- 
hatred. Ceaselessly he had battled for the 
Fellow of the Other Eace, whether he were 
Wop or Dago, Hun or Hike. That thing 
he did. He made of Tammany a real 
melting-pot. He made race-prejudice a 
thing that had to hide and skulk and dis- 
guise itself, if it were to exist at all in 
New York. 



170 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Then, this good work being done, he was 
an old man; and there came to him — fan- 
tastically out of the blue heaven — the most 
splendid adventure in love and matrimony 
the world has seen in centuries. He was 
seventy-three years old. You had said he 
was done with that sort of adventure. 
Destiny was not of your way of thinking. 
I can see the Obscure Powers, gathered in 
conference, saying: "He has done the 
work we gave him to do ; he has slain the 
dirty phantom of race; and now let us 
choose for him a reward in which there is 
a wild and splendid kind of fitness' ' — and 
they sent him a Bed Princess ! 

Do you see the epic fitness of it? 

It was as though the Obscure Powers had 
seen that the only reward worthy of this 
grim old chief, who had fought for the 
hated races, was a woman taken from the 
saddest, darkest race in all the world. If 
ever again I come to doubt that we, being 
men and women, are the tools Destiny 
works her will with, I shall but have to 
think of this grim, gray old man and his 
epic reward. 

She was a red-skinned girl who had run 
about on bare heels among blanketed In- 
dians until she was twelve years old. A 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 171 

wild thing, but in her the soul of a princess, 
a raiding princess. What she raided was 
the white man's civilization and the white 
man's culture. The beginning was that 
she "went to school in Muskegee" I do not 
know what that is, but already it has the 
air of an achievement — to face and con- 
quer the learning of Muskegee. And then 
a white man's university in Wisconsin and 
the diploma of spinster of arts; and on — 
still going on — to the white man's Boston 
to "study in a school of expression"; and, 
at last, to New York and the highest white 
attainments — to ride at the head of a suf- 
frage parade, to beat the war drum in a 
notable powwow of the Women's Political 
Union; a wide and swift career she took 
in those eleven years. She had raided the 
white man's culture. His civilization 
dangled from her belt. 

And she looked out over the heads of 
mankind and said : ' i Where is my man f ' ' 

With what biped could this red eagle 
mate? 

There was never an Indian loved money. 
That is why they are dying out of our 
absurd civilization. The Cherokee maid 
had as soon thought of loving her shoes 
or the stool she sat on to lace them up, as 



172 TAKE IT FROM ME 

to love green dollars of paper or round 
white dollars of silver. It couldn't get into 
her head that there is anything sacro-sanct 
about dollars. Not even millions of them. 
She hadn't the kind of imagination that 
adores millions. No Indian has. It was not 
money she wanted to marry. Only a raider 
like herself — as ruthless and successful — 
only a conquistador should loose the 
braided black coils of her hair. 

And she looked over the heads of men. 

Taller than all the rest rose the old, 
white, savage head of Eichard Croker. 
What she said was: "That is the head of 
my man." 

There he stood, the old chief, whose scars 
and spoils were countless, the conquering 
old warrior of the race that had conquered 
her race — the hoary old man, festooned 
with the scalps of many a daring raid. 

And the white and savage and silent old 
man, who had hunted prey and peril and 
adventure for over half a century? 

Was not this brave, wild girl his due 
reward? 

She was laid on his old age like flowers. 

Because he had fought one good fight — 
because, in spite of crimes civic and politi- 
cal, he had fought valiantly against race- 



FELLOW OF THE OTHER RACE 173 

hatred, the Obscure Powers crowned him 
royally with love. And it was ont of the 
darkness and sorrow of a degraded race 
they plucked for him the flower of love. 
Nothing is unrewarded. Even in this world 
— on this plane of life — even one good deed 
brings its reward. And always — take it 
from me — the reward is paid in kind. 

Do but one good thing for the Fellow of 
the Other Eace and it is from him your 
reward will come. He has it, even now, in 
his hands ; and he is waiting at the corner 
of the street. 

It is a foul thing, race-prejudice. It is 
dirty and obscure as some old idol, smeared 
with filth and blood. It is the mother of 
war. A foul thing — the fouler because it 
is dying. 

You and I, at least, need have none of 
it. We can look at the Fellow of the Other 
Eace and see that he has something we 
need — even as we have something, long 
ago bred into our social strain, which he 
needs. And, like Tammany " leaders,' ' 
we can take it from him. That, and noth- 
ing else, is the meaning of this ferment- 
ing American life. Give and take, the fu- 
sion of race-qualities, the blending of what 
is best in the old separate families of man- 



174 TAKE IT FROM ME 

kind that the perfecter man may be 
made. 

It is the fellow of the Other Eace who 
holds yonr share of the future of your 
children and your democracy. You can't 
turn him out, if you would ; he has his part 
of bed and board; and unless you can un- 
derstand him — give your best and take his 
best — it is not he who will have to go, but 
you. 

Do you see? 

Whether you will or not you must live 
your life in terms of the Other Fellow, be 
his race what it may. 

There is a mighty civilization brewing 
here in the United States ; you are but one 
of the ingredients ; and will you not agree 
with me — just once; you needn't make a 
habit of it — that there is stark absurdity in 
hating any one of the Other Ingredients, 
bubbling with you in the pot? 



IX 



THE MYSTERY OF THE OTHER 
FELLOW 



IX 



THE MYSTERY OF THE OTHER 
FELLOW 

1 WOULD not have you go away with 
the thought that the battle of life is 
fought below the belt — that it is a 
thing of games and bread-work and poli- 
tics. Life is something bigger and more 
mysterious. In ordinary times we see 
nothing but the daily needs and duties with 
which it is crusted over. You go about 
your day's work, much as I go about mine 
— with steady patience or passionate en- 
ergy? just as the mood runs. Often the 
work is interesting. Sometimes it is 
touched with nobility. But it is a rare 
thing when we have to lift our heads and 
look up to see it. Usually the day's work, 
for the luckiest of us, belongs to the hands 
and the feet. 

If you are work-fellows with a machine 
it sucks out of your muscles as much vigor 
as it needs, and, at the day's end, lets you 

177 



178 TAKE IT FROM ME 

go back to table and bed to make up the 
loss. If your trade has to do with things 
of the mind it is much the same; your 
thoughts wheel, like birds, over the daily 
materialisms lying on the ground. 

It takes something tremendous to make 
us look up. 

Were I to speak from personal experi- 
ence, I should say the only certain way of 
startling a man out of his selfhood is to 
explode a volcano under his feet. Perhaps 
my kind of selfishness was solider than 
that of most men. I do not know. Any- 
way, I am quite willing to admit that for 
years I went on complacently revolving on 
myself — like a Dervish spinning on his 
heels. And I knew the Other Fellow, I 
fear, merely as an outside entity that 
threw flowers or brickbats at me. That he 
was recognizably like myself never oc- 
curred to me. He was something outside 
me — a two-legged thing with hands, in 
which he carried what I wanted or did not 
want. 

It was simple as that — until I stepped 
on a volcano. 

I dare say your experience has been 
much the same. What your volcano was 
I know not, but something happened — some 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 179 

tremendous adventure like falling in love 
happened — and you ceased to spin round 
on your heels, and, looking steadily, saw 
the world was full of Other Fellows. 

My adventure, I remember, happened in 
the Puy de Dome. It was a dozen years 
ago when I and the automobiles were 
young. In those days in Europe we had 
international races. I entered a car in the 
race from Paris to Madrid, which was des- 
tined to be the last of those wild, death- 
defying raids. My motor car was a mon- 
ster — for those days — having two cylinders 
and a 20-30 horsepower. I might remark 
that I carried not only extra tires, but, 
as well, an extra cylinder. It was a Red 
Brute. Stripped to the chassis, the me- 
chanician crouching on the running board, 
we ran out of Paris — the thirteenth car 
loosed in the race. That was a wild ride 
through France. Traffic and pedestrians 
had been ordered off the road and soldiery 
guarded the route. Even at that, it was 
bad driving for the dogs of night hurled 
themselves at the new Devil-wagons and 
the very soldiers, set to guard the way, 
wandered into the middle of the road and 
stood gaping — to get themselves killed. 

It was toward dawn that "I got mine." 



180 TAKE IT FROM ME 

We had crossed the Puy de Dome, and, 
just before dawn, were running down a 
mountain road. Ahead of us lay the little 
stone village of Les Escoudes. That means 
the Elbows. The narrow street turned once 
like an elbow, and then bent again the 
other way, like some awful and grotesque 
arm that should have two contrary elbows 
in it. And this tortuous street was lined 
solidly, in the French way, with low stone 
houses. It was like driving through a stone 
intestine. 

And of course from a stone stable in 
that street of stone houses there came 
crawling out into the dawn a leisurely pair 
of oxen, hauling a huge cart in which a 
peasant woman stood, mooning. They 
filled the little street from side to side. 
And the Eed Brute at nearly eighty kilo- 
meters an hour was running down the 
steep grade straight at the muddle of oxen, 
woman and cart. There was one soft- 
looking spot in that lane of stone — faggots 
piled high against a house wall to the left. 
And the Eed Brute nosed for it. What I 
saw was my mechanician swept off into the 
air as the faggots caught him, stripping 
off the flesh from ankle to thigh-bone ; and 
then the Eed Brute hurdled across the 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 181 

street and dived — as a clown goes through 
a paper hoop — crashing through the thick 
oak doors of a cow-stable. There, before 
battering her evil brains out against the 
stone pillars, she jerked me out into soft 
oblivion. When I came to myself I thanked 
God for the cows, for what I was pitched 
into was a soft, deep, life-saving bed. 

It is because I did "come to" that I 
have told this old adventure. 

Have you ever been nearly killed? 

It is a strange and terrible thing, after 
hope has gone out of you, to be raised from 
the dead. 

You do not know where you have been, 
but you know that for one fierce moment 
you were stripped of selfhood — that you 
lost the clutch of self. You were loose in 
a bigger world. In some strange way you 
saw yourself as part of others — you shared 
an amazing fellowship. 

As honestly as I can state it, that is pre- 
cisely what came out of that adventure of 
mine with volcanic things. For the first 
time I saw men, not as trees moving, but 
as parts of a whole in which I, too, had 
part. 

They had carried us into the village inn. 
We lay on the floor surrounded by people 



182 TAKE IT FKOM ME 

and, looking up, suddenly, I knew all the 
people and their faces and their eyes and 
their dreams and the share they had with 
one in the Splendid Secret of life. So 
knowingly we looked at each other, like 
accomplices in a wonderful conspiracy of 
love and service and unity. From the pool 
of blood in which he lay Louis reached out 
and caught my hand and held it; and he 
said in a queer whisper : "J'aivu la mort 
dans les yeux." And I knew that he, too, 
had seen strange things there. For that 
one moment he had been unselfed— as 
there was One unselfed from the begin- 
ning, 

The Great Adventure 

Something of that sort you may see when 
men go out to war. It was in Picardy I 
saw it. These were not mere men of 
France who went out to war; they were 
an army. Individuality had disappeared; 
they did not think of "I"; they spoke only 
of "we." And that was remarkable. The 
soldier's pride was not in himself, but in 
the fact that he was part of something 
greater than self. I do not say that sort of 
thing lasted. It is hard to get one's breath 
for long on those white heights of per- 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 183 

feet unity. I saw the men come back after 
the battle. They were no longer an army. 
They were just a throng of suffering hu- 
man beings. They were merely men, 
limping, wounded, wrapped in bloody 
bandages. They had fallen back from the 
universal to the particular. That is true; 
but they had stood, if only for an hour, 
on the white peaks. And that great ad- 
venture gave them something. They will 
never be quite what they were before — as 
Louis and I can never again be the men 
we were before we went down into the 
village of Les Escoudes — Did I tell you that 
fourteen men were killed in that race to 
Madrid? They stared too long dans les 
yeux de la mort. 

You may think of these soldiers of Pic- 
ardy in any way you please; you may 
think of them as the blithe and careless 
soldiers of France; but I know — for I 
asked them — in those swift hours of battle 
they had sensed for the first time the sway 
of universal life. What Carlyle called the 
Great Fact of Existence had become great 
to them ; and never again can they get out 
of the awful presence of this Eeality. 
Fearful and wonderful, "real as Life, real 
as Death, is the Universe" to them. 



184 TAKE IT FROM ME 

Some day the history of the war will give 
a page to that strange scene, when Paris 
— the shrill, derisive Paris, you have been 
merry in — swarmed and jammed its way 
into Notre Dame. And they filled the vast 
cathedral from wall to wall. They hung 
like bunches of grapes on the ancient pil- 
lars. And, outside, the parvis and the 
square were black with humanity on its 
knees. Streets to right and left were filled, 
and the bridge and the quays. Thousands 
upon tens of thousands, and they sang the 
ancient canticles and the old archbishop 
came out with words and gestures of 
prayer. 

This was as miraculous a thing as has 
happened in the twentieth century — Paris, 
on its knees, praying. 

Up in a little town in Picardy I saw 
the same miracle. And at times it seems 
as though I had never really known France, 
for this was a new nation in a new world. 

It was at Albert. That little town is 
a heap of ashes and broken stone and rot- 
ting bodies now, for the Enemy passed 
that way. But I was there before the 
Germans passed that way. It lay, an un- 
fortified little village, on the pretty river 
Ancre, a place of no importance save to 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 185 

the few thousand quiet folk who lived 
there. One day, in the first month of the 
war, thousands of troops, French and 
British, were being sent through Albert 
on their way to the front. Thousands upon 
thousands of French soldiers were massed 
in the station and along the metals. 

I was standing, with a French officer, 
on the bridge high over the railway tracks. 
We leaned over the parapet watching the 
troops entrain. It was a blazing day, a 
half-hour after mid-noon. Suddenly the 
air seemed to darken — down below us and 
round us. And the sun that had been 
a blazing ball, turned into a red and 
dirty disk, with rags of crepe hanging 
from it. It was as though "life and the 
world and the laws of sunlight" had 
passed away ; and the kingdom of the dead 
had begun. 

And the Parisian officer said: "Bon 
Lieu! the sun is going out!" 

Then we remembered about the eclipse ; 
and I said : " It is over all of Europe — but 
it is the darkest over France.' ' 

He leaned over the bridge and shouted 
down into the darkness. "What he shouted 
was : i l God save France ! ' ' 

And out of the darkness below thousands 



186 TAKE IT FKOM ME 

and thousands of mysterious voices shouted 
back: "God save France !" 

It was an extraordinary thing. A month 
earlier you had said it was an impossible 
thing. It was as though there had come 
back to France the old, high spirit of 
faith that sent the Crusaders over deserts 
and seas, crying their Dieu le vult. It 
was as though, in the darkness of noonday 
and the terror of war, her high spiritual 
destiny had called to her once more. And, 
in war-pains unspeakable a new France 
was born. 

An illustration ; it is no more, unless the 
thought takes us further on. 

What these spick soldiers gained, in the 
tumult of battle and eclipse, you and I 
must get, as best we can, in the dusty, 
quotidian walks of life. Not often will 
volcanoes open beneath our feet. In the 
plain business of life, in giving and taking, 
in working and playing, we have got to 
uncover the Great Truth. 

What is it? 

The certain truth that you, with all your 
passionate sense of selfhood, are not your- 
self alone. You are not yourself alone. 
Oh, truly enough you are part of the 
universal life. You are part of that 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 187 

thing of eddies and attractions called 
humanity. 

You are kinsman to all mankind. 

This is the widest, certainest truth in all 
the world. Nor is there anything vague 
in it. It does not leave you adrift in a 
blind, impersonal sea of universal kinship. 
If it were a mere Nirvanic generalization, 
my whole protest should go forth against 
it. It is not that at all ; it is at once, some- 
thing less or more. The brotherhood of 
humanity is a truth deep as the sea and 
certain as the sun, but it finds visible ex- 
pression only in your brotherliness for the 
man next door and the man across the way. 

Unless the Other Fellow is as real to 
you as yourself, he is a mere theory — a 
thing to tie big words to — and the " Great 
Fact of Existence" that startled Carlyle 
as he walked to Leith, is mere emotion- 
alism. 

You have got to see that the great fact 
of existence is the simplest fact of all ; and 
here it is: 

Every morning as you stare into your 
shaving mirror you are looking at two 
faces — your own face and that of the Other 
Fellow. 



188 TAKE IT FROM ME 

The Other Fellow's Hands 

Will you take it from me ? 

By way of the few last words that tie 
together the meaning and the message of 
this little book, take it from me that your 
life and its destiny are not yours — they 
are in the hands of the Other Fellow. 

It does not matter how low the plane 
you live on is, or how high a standard you 
have set. You may be looking for the 
dingiest sort of a reward — for money or 
the feathers and gilt braid of life. 

It is from the Other Fellow you must get 
them. 

And if the finest motives call you out for 
service it is only from him you can learn 
how to serve. 

Are you a poet, wild — as the young 
Shelley said he was "wild to sing"? 

You can't even write poems for your- 
self; you must write them for the Other 
Fellow. Singing to one's self, like talking 
to one's self, is the first intimation of 
lunacy. Whether you want high things 
or low things — things rare or common 
— you must go to the Other Fellow for 
them. 

He is your paymaster. 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 189 

Is this a selfish way to look at it? 

On the contrary, it is the fullest, sanest 
way to look at it. For it is not only that 
you get your reward from the Other Fel- 
low — it is only through unselfishness you 
can build up your own triumphant self- 
hood. He has your pay in his hands, but 
in addition it is only by knowing him that 
you can come to know yourself. 

He comes and goes — the Other Fellow. 
He passes you in the street. He sits be- 
side you in tram car or trolley. He works 
at your bench or plays in your tennis court. 

Take a look at him. 

Upon my word, I envy you, for you are 
starting out upon the most stupendous ad- 
venture in life; you are going to see the 
Other Fellow — as he is. It is more excit- 
ing than stage-plays — more thrilling than 
sagas of the sea. 

There he is, the Other Fellow, going 
mysteriously about his business of life. 

What is his little game? 

Every man, you know, is on secret ser- 
vice. 

He has slipped down into life, on some 
special mission. Often he is in disguise 
— bearded, perhaps, with a hat pulled down 
over his eyes, or he has stained his skin 



190 TAKE IT FROM ME 

black or yellow in order to look like some 
one else. And in that dark, fur-footed way 
of his, he goes about his obscure business. 
Your immense joy lies in trying to find out 
what secret service he is on — who he really 
is, under his disguise. Now and then, as 
you have word with him, he lets slip a 
little of his secret. More and more, as you 
come to know him, the disguise becomes 
transparent. Until, at some familiar mo- 
ment of day or night, you get a look into 
his eyes — 

And you know him and you know the 
secret service he is on. 

Then it is you smile, revealingly, into 
each other's eyes, for the mystery has van- 
ished in the great discovery that you and 
he are in the same service — working for 
the same Paymaster. 

I do not care " tuppence" who the Other 
Fellow is — whether he walks the world 
disguised in rags or in stripes or in a 
surplice or a uniform — inevitably when 
you get close to him, he will whisper the 
password and tell you that, he, too, is "in 
the service. ' ' And life is, indeed, a splen- 
did adventure when you think of it as 
being made up of those meetings with un- 
known and mysterious men, grimly dis- 



MYSTERY OF THE OTHER FELLOW 191 

guised, who suddenly reveal themselves as 
secret brothers of the order. 

Look at the Other Fellow, as he passes — 

He, too, is one of them. Indeed, he is 
the very one who carries in his hands yonr 
destiny and your pay. And if you go to 
him, frankly as one brother goes to an- 
other, he will be ready enough with his: 
"Here you are, brother, I've only been 
keeping it safe for you!" And if he is 
a surly dog? There are no surly dogs. 
That is merely part of the disguise. 

Is it clear? 

Alone, you can get nothing you want, 
nothing you need, nothing — be it bread and 
butter and leather shoes or the white 
crown of spiritual service and spiritual 
conquest — you can get nothing alone. 

All you live for — service and reward — 
is in the hands of the Other Fellow; and 
he is waiting for you at the corner of the 
street. 

Take it from me — 



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